BLOOM
     by Wil Mccarthy

     Psynopsis
        Mycora: technogenic life. Fast-reproducing, fast-mutating, and
   endlessly voracious. In the year 2106, these microscopic
   machine/creatures have escaped their creators to populate the inner
   solar system with a wild, deadly ecology all their own, pushing the
   tattered remnants of humanity out into the cold and dark of the outer
   planets. Even huddled beneath the ice of Jupiter's moons, protected by
   a defensive system known as the Immunity, survivors face the constant
   risk of mycospores finding their way to the warmth and brightness
   inside the habitats, resulting in a calamitous "bloom."

   But the human race still has a trick or two up its sleeves; in a ship
   specially designed to penetrate the deadly Mycosystem, seven
   astronauts are about to embark on mankind's boldest venture yet--the
   perilous journey home to infected Earth!

   Yet it is in these remote conditions, against a virtually omnipotent
   foe, that we discover how human nature plays the greatest role in
   humanity's future.



     THE BALLANTINE PUBLISHING GROUP
     NEW YORK A
Del Rey®Book Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

     Copyright © 1998 by Wil McCarthy

     All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
 Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine
Publishing  Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in       Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto.

     http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/

     LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA McCarthy, Wil.
     Bloom / Wil McCarthy.--lst ed.
     p. cm.
     "A Del Rey book"--T.p, verso. ISBN 0-345-40857-8 (alk. paper) I.
     Title.
     PS3563.C337338B58 1998
     	813'.54--dc21 	98-15435 			CIP

     	Manufactured in the United States of  America

     	Book design by Mary A. Wirth

     First Edition: September 1998

     zERO
     SOMETIMES THEY GET IN

     This much we know: that the
Innensburg bloom began with a single spore; that Immune response was
sluggish and ineffective; that the first witness on the scene, one 
Holger Sanchez Mach, broke the nearest emergency glass, dropped two 
magnums and a witch's tit, and died. Did he  suffer? Did it hurt?
     Conversion must have taken at least four seconds, and we can 
probably  assume it started with the feet. These things usually do.
     By the time the Response teams began arriving, the bloom was some 
ten  meters across, and two meters high at the centera fractal-jagged 
bubble of  rainbow fog, class two threaded structure almost certainly 
visible to those  unfortunate enough to be standing within fecund 
radius when the fruiting  bodies swelled and popped. Twenty deaths 
followed almost immediately, and  another hundred in the minutes that 
followed.
     There were cameras and instruments on the scene by this time, 
windows on  what can only seem to be separate events, each holograph 
showing a different  fleeing mob or collapsing building, each 
soundtrack recording a different       cacophony of whimpers and death 
screams andjarringly irrelevant  conversation.
     I personally have collaged these scenes a dozen times or more, 
arranging  the panic this way and that way, over and over again in the 
hope that some  sense will emerge. But there is no sense in those first 
few minutes, just the  pettiness and blind, stamping fear of the human 
animal stripped bare.
     and the heroism, yes;for me the central image is that of Enrico 
Giselle,  Tech Two, pushing his smudged helmet and visor back on his 
forehead and  shouting into a voice phone, while the walls behind him 
froth and shimmer and disintegrate.
     "Class five. Class five. Drop two hundred and flush on my command, 
     " at this point, finally, the city began to awaken. The Immunity 
isolated samples of the invading mycorum, sequenced them, added them to 
the catalog of known  pathogens. Better late than never, one supposes, 
but by the time the bloom  outmassed the city's Immune system by a 
factor (several million, and though  submicroscopic phages gathered at 
its sizzling interface, now ropy with  tendrils that sputtered outward 
in Escheresque whorls, the growth was       not visibly affected.
     Fortunately, like all living things, technogenic organhms require 
energy  to survive, and where the witch's tits had fallen or been 
hurled, pools of  bitter cold had arrested the replication process. Not 
unusual, as any  Response officer will tell you. and like organic 
lebenforms, mycora are also  vulnerable to excess energy. Backpack UV 
lasers were proving effective  weapons against the bloom, and soon the 
streets clanged with discarded chem  spritzers and paraphage guns as 
bloomfighters concentrated on the things  that worked.
     High above the city, the cavern roof came alive with UV turrets of 
its  own.
     Machine-guided and wary of the soft humans below, the beams swept 
back  and forth, charring trenches through the rainbow mist, the living 
dust, the  bloom of submicroscopic mycora still eating everything in 
their reach and  converting it to more of themselves. and to other 
things, as well, a trillion  microscopic construction projects all 
running in parallel, following whatever  meaningless program the 
mycogene codes called out. By now the secund zone was half a kilometer 
across, riddled with gaps and voids in the outer regions but much 
denser at its core, a thickening haze which already blocked the view  
from one side to the other. Up to four stories tall in places, higher 
than  most of the surrounding buildings, and it had begun to take on 
structure as  well--picks and urchins, mostly, standing out visibly in 
the haze, their  prismatic spines lengthening more than fast enough for 
the human eye to  see.
     Some mycora eat lightly, sucking up building blocks like carbon 
and  hydrogen while leaving the heavier elements alone, but this one
was pulling  the gold right off the streets, the steel right off the
shingled walls, the  zirconium right out of the windowpanes. You've
seen the pictures: a giant  bite out of lnnensburg's south side,
gingerbread houses dissolving like  a dream.
     The UV lasers, while no doubt satisfying for those employing them,
were  if anything adding to the problem by throwing waste heat into
the bloom,  giving it that much more energy to work with, to feed on.
     Finally, Innensburg's central processor sought permission from the 
mayor  and city council to move to Final alert. Permission was granted, 
the overhead  lights and household power grid were shut off, the 
ladderdown reactors  stopped, and the air system reconfigured to pipe 
through cooling  radiators closer to the surface.
     The cold, the dark. How we humans hate these things, and how very 
much  we need them.
     Like all Jupiter's moons, like all the moons of the outer system,  
Ganymede's surface is cold enough to liquefy both oxygen and nitrogen, 
and  while the spore-fouled air was not cooled quite that far, 
Innensburg's ground  temperature quickly dropped below the freezing 
point of water, and then below  that of carbon dioxide. seconds-brief 
rain fell and froze. Mycoric  replication slowed to a crawl. A sigh of 
mingled fear and relief went up all  over the city, visible as columns 
(white steam in the flashlight beams of the  Response. The emergency 
far from over, but now survivable, now something that       could be 
dealt with in a reasoned, methodical manner.
     Some thirty-one deaths were later attributed to the cold, to the  
darkness, to the lack of domestic power and computing, and though some 
of the  families did attempt to bring suit against the authorities 
responsible,  public and judicial outrage squashed the move before it 
had gotten very far. 
     One hundred and eightyseven deaths preceded the chilldown, after 
all, and  most of Innensburg's fifty thousand residents came out of it 
with only minor       injuries.
     Throughout the Immunity, our problems are the same: so far from 
the  places of our birth, so far from the sun's warm rays, so far from 
the lives  we once expected to lead. Eaten by the Mycosystem, those 
lives, and billions  of others as well. and yet out here in the cold 
and dark we hang on, even  thrive, because we're brave enough to 
believe we can. If the space around us  is lousy with mycoric spores 
blown upward by solar wind, well, at least we  can do what's necessary 
to keep them outside.
     I think the Honorable Klaus Pensbruck, in closing the book on 
Glazer v.
     Cholm, speaks for us all with his immortal words, "Shut up, lady. 
We  don't want to end up like the Earth. ' From Innensburg and the Fear 
of  Failure 

ONE
DESTINATION

That my first meeting with Vaclav Lottick
went poorly goes without saying.
     The most powerful man in the solar system, yes, you can believe he
had  better things to do than exchange small talk with me. And yet, 
certain  business can be conducted in no other way.
     He looked up and smiled when his secretary, a quiet, efficient 
man,  ushered me inside the office. Everything beige and cream and 
shiny, not quite  sterile in appearance but compact, and clean. Very 
clean. The windows' light  was from behind Lottick, highlighting every 
stray hair, and the desk lamp  seemed designed to show off the lines 
in his face. A pale man, nearly bald,  his rumpled smock no longer 
white. Even his zee-spec was an older model,  blocky, folding his ears 
back, weighing on the bridge of his nose, leaving  his features to sag 
that much more.
     "John Strasheim, hi," he said, rising from his chair and extending 
a  hand. "Thanks for coming on such short notice. You're a few minutes  
early, actually."
     Shaking the proffered appendage, I shrugged. "Just eager to 
oblige, I  guess. What can I--" "Take a seat, then. Set to receive a 
flash?"
     "Sure." Who wasn't?
     His thick fingers danced in the space between us. My RECEVC light 
went  on, and the air before me came alive with information, image 
windows and text  windows and schematic windows rastering in and then 
shrinking to icons as my  spec compressed them in working memory. Too 
quick to see much in the way of  detail. Pictures of blooms, I thought. 
Pictures of mycora. Well, what to       expect from the Immunity's head 
of research?
     I sat.
     "I've seen your work," he said to me, his voice vaguely approving.
     "And read it. Funny, how nobody seems to be doing that sort of     
  thing anymore."
     "You're talking about Innensburg?"
     He nodded. Behind the zee-spec, his eyes were bright green.
     "Yes, Innensburg. I survey your net channels from time to time, 
but it  was that piece that really caught my eye. About as close as we 
have to a  regional history, and plaintext was a ... curiously 
appropriate choice of  medium. Very astute. I stayed up all night 
reading it."
     "Thank you," I said, nodding once to accept the compliment.
     Then I smiled politely, waiting. Whatever he'd invited me here to  
     discuss, this wasn't it.
     He studied me for a moment, then relaxed, turning off the charm 
like a  lamp he no longer needed. "All right, then."
     His fingers stroked the air, manipulating symbols and menus I 
couldn't  see.
     One of my image icons began to flicker. I touched and expanded it, 
moved  the resulting window to the lower right corner of my vision. It 
was a video  loop, false-color, depicting a complex mycorum which 
replicated itself in  slow motion, over and over again. Not quite 
crablike, not quite urchinlike,  not quite organic in appearance. A 
tiny machine, like a digger/constructor  but smaller than the smallest 
bacterium, putting copies of itself together  with cool precision, 
building them up out of nothing, out of pieces too small  for the 
micrograph to capture. In short, a pretty typical piece of  technogenic 
life. At the bottom of the window scrolled a horizontal code  ribbon 
showing, in a series of brightly colored blocks, what was presumably  
the data gene sequence which dictated both the mycorum's structure and  
behavior.
     "This," Lottick said, "is Io Sengen 3a, a sulfurated mycorum with  
unknown environmental tolerance. Gave us a scare a while back when we 
thought  it could replicate in the volcanic flows on Io, but that 
turned out to be a       false alarm. Now we're concerned again, for 
different reasons."
     "Okay." I nodded, waiting for more, not yet sure why he was 
telling me  this.
     Another image icon flickered. Summoned, expanded, and formatted, 
it  depicted a macrophage of some sort, immediately recognizable to any 
Immunity  citizen as one of the good guys, though the configuration was 
not a  familiar one.
     Rather like a mechanized coral polyp, I'll say, though close 
inspection  revealed details inconsistent with that tag. At any rate, 
it was the same  apparent size as the mycorum, though of course the 
scale must have been ten  or twenty times less fine. Indeed, the 
yellow tick marks along the top and  side of the image probably marked 
out a grid of one-tenth-micrometer squares.
     Again, a data gene sequence scrolled by underneath.
     "The Philusburg Optima phage," Lottick said. "Release 
one-point-four.
     Thermal IR power coupler, has to be within six meters of a 
mini-lad or  other major heat source to function. Note the gene 
sequences, please. This  may duplicate some of the information you've 
already got, but I wanted to  impress upon you the potential 
significance of this finding."
     "Finding?" I paused, blinked. "Doctor, I'm afraid we're speaking  
different languages. Why, exactly, am I here?"
     Lottick seemed surprised at that, looking up, his brow furrowing. 
"You  didn't get the information packet," he said. Not a question.
     "I don't think so, no.I got a message with a meeting date and 
time,  that's all."
     He was out of his chair, grumbling. "My apologies, Mr. Strasheim. 
In  their current task loading my staff may have.., overlooked it. 
There was no       intention of wasting your time."
     "You people have a lot on your minds," I said, diplomatically. In 
fact,  my trip here had been rather a welcome break from the factory, 
and if I had  to linger a little longer than expected, well, that was 
more job time I could       justify missing.
     "I have a few things to attend to," Lottick said, ignoring my 
attempt at  mollification. He gestured at the sliding glass door behind 
his desk.
     "If you'd like to wait out on the balcony, I'll come join you in a 
 few minutes.
     Right now there's an ear that needs twisting before it goes off 
shift.
     Several ears, actually."
     "Oh," I said, rising, "sure. By all means." I wanted to get 
involved  in'that about as much as I wanted to go back to work at the 
factory, which  was not very much. But Lottick's balcony would afford 
fresher air, a view of  the city, a rare moment of quiet. "Take as long 
as you need; it's really  no trouble."
     Cursing softly, he brushed past me, went out the door. Behind his 
desk,  the sliding glass door did indeed appear to have a balcony 
behind it. I moved  to it, touched the handle. It slid open, powered 
but silent, looking  heavy.
     Glass? It was zirconium, of course--much stronger and heavier and, 
in  these ladderdown days, just as free for the taking. But in 
language, as in  life, the old habits linger.
     Lottick's office was on the top floor of the tallest building in  
Ansharton, ten stories high and right up against the side of the 
cavern, so  that essentially every part of the city was visible, a pool 
of tiny,  picturesque houses and factories spilling out across the 
broad cavern floor. 
     A magnificent view, but it probably owed as much to logic as to 
politics.
     Even here there were blooms, probably a few small ones every week, 
and  Research certainly needed to keep an eye out. Vaclav Lottick was 
no prince,  no president, no corporate bureaucrat from times gone by, 
but simply a  harried worker like everyone else, the contents of his 
head and the work of  his hands outvaluing all the golden streets of 
Ganymede.
     He even had a small telescope mounted on the railing, pointing 
down at  the city. I peered through it, saw only a street corner, not  
particularly busy.
     Whisper-quiet, the zirconium door slid closed behind me.
     There were no chairs out here, no furniture of any sort; the 
balcony was  really only large enough for standing, large enough for 
maybe four or five  people at the very most. I put my elbows on the 
railing, leaned out.
     I'd long ago lost my fear of heights; we cling to architectural 
styles  meant for ten times the gravity we actually experience, deep in 
the mantles  of the Jovian moons. In fact, there was no height from 
which I could fall  that was likely to injure me, except possibly the 
cavern roof itself.
     But neither was I going to jump--for some reason, we don't do 
that,  either. So I simply waited, looking down on the cars and trucks 
rolling along  on their eggbeater wheels, at the fat-tired bicycles and 
occasional  pedestrians that hurried through the Ansharton streets. 
Looking up at the  cavern roof, stony but clotted densely with light 
sources that simulated, on  this day, a diffuse sun shining through 
streaky clouds, with hints of blue  breaking through here and there. 
And the cranes and work gantries and laser  turrets poking down from 
this ersatz sky, completely ruining the effect. I       sometimes 
wonder who we think we're fooling.
     At least there was wind, which I stood there and enjoyed for what 
seemed  like a long time. Ten minutes? Twenty? Longer than I usually 
have, to stand  around doing nothing. Eventually, the sliding door 
opened and closed, and  Vaclav Lottick was there beside me, leaning on 
the railing, looking out  on the cityscape with me.
     "I don't need the whole song and dance," I told him softly. "If    
   it's easier, you can just give me the highlights."
     "It's easier," he agreed, then paused, taking breath a few times.
     He was calmer now than before. "And I'm sorry for the delay. You 
know  that mycora mutate quickly, right? Everyone knows that. A key 
strength, a key  factor. The whole Mycosystem probably depends on this, 
or it would have  died out long ago."
     "So I've heard."
     "Yes, well, what you probably haven't heard is that they're 
stealing  data gene sequences from our own phages. Nothing major, 
nothing all that  important, but the mechanism and its potential 
limitations are not known at       this time."
     "Stealing gene sequences?" I repeated stupidly. My skin had gone  
cold and crawly. Mycora were not intelligent, not even alive, really.
     How could they steal?
     "It's probably nothing," Lottick said. "Statistically, the chance 
that  they'll steal something important and actually be able to use it 
to their  advantage is ... Well, it's zero, basically. But we don't 
understand the       mechanism, and that has a lot of people upset, and 
bringing pressure to bear.
     What if the Mycosystem gets hold of some of our environmental  
adaptations?
     What happens if they stumble on nuclear fission, or cascade 
fusion, or  God help us all, they manage to copy some of our ladderdown 
designs?"
     "I don't know," I said, still cold. "What?"
     He shrugged. "They eat the solar system, I guess. They eat the 
universe. 
     It's not going to happen, Strasheim, but that's the worst-case 
scenario we've  got to dance around. Hence the mission."
     "The starship?" I asked, puzzled but optimistic. Whatever the 
problem  was, these people seemed to be on top of it. Sort of.
     "The starship, yeah, right." He chuckled, sounding tired. "We get 
it  built, we fuel it up, we go on our merry way, every single person 
that  wants to.
     That's not going to happen either. I know it's the party line, and 
maybe  that's best for the time being, but the real goal of the program 
is to get       our spores out to the neighboring stars before the 
Mycosystem beats us to  it.
     Immune system fully established, deny the mycora a toehold even in 
the  warm, bright spaces. But we've probably got a thousand years to 
worry about  it, and a lot to keep us busy until then."
     "So what are we talking about?"
     "The Louis Pasteur," he said. "You may have heard about it here
and  there; the program is being accelerated in a big way. Ship is 
designed for  inner system operation; high-temperature, high-radiation, 
also the t-balance  hull--theoretically bloomproof. But of course, ha 
ha, we're not going to test  that here on Ganymede. The only way to 
test it is to fly it down there, into  the Mycosystem, and see if 
anything eats it. We hope to do that soon, and if  the testing goes 
well, we'll fly it all the way down to Earth and Mars and  Luna. The 
thinking goes: Even in the inner system, there are places too cold,  
dark, barren for mycora to bloom. If any serious cold-weather 
adaptations  start appearing, the first signs of it will probably be 
there. So we drop a  few detectors on some polar caps, and suddenly 
nobody's bothering us about  this problem anymore.
     Not unless the detectors start screaming at us, which I don't 
think is  going to happen."
     "Are these state secrets?" I asked, turning to look at his face. 
"Can I  talk about this stuff?"
     His look was disapproving. "There are no secrets, Mr. Strasheim.
     There's barely any state, and I didn't invite you up here to waste 
your  time.
     If we didn't want you to talk about this, what would we want you 
for? To  make shoes? You have skills which nobody else in the Immunity 
seems to  possess.
     You're a commentator, an historian; you record simple facts in a 
way  that's accessible to the public, even entertaining. That ability 
could be  very useful for this project, if you're willing to lend it to 
us for a  while."
     "It sounds fascinating," I said sincerely. "I take it you want me 
to  write an article?"
     Lottick looked at me like I was somewhat stupider than he'd been  
expecting.
     "No, son. I thought we understood each other. I want you to go on 
the       mission."

     TwO
     WOMBS

     Weightless in the solitude of a ballista car, I
pondered. Thought of tunnels arching through the planet, of the cars
being fired through them like signals through an optic-fiber network. 
Of cavern cities and macroimmune  systems and the nearly million people 
who comprised the only society I'd ever  really known. I was eleven 
when we left the Earth.
     I keep the lights off when I'm cannonballing, at least when I'm 
doing it  alone, so there was nothing around me but the sound-absorbing 
padding of the  walls, neither seen nor felt. The iconified I B images 
on my zee-spec might  well have been the only light in the universe. I 
studied them.
     Lottick had indeed hit the highlights in his brief speech. Under 
some  unknown set of conditions, mycora could absorb (scan? hack?) 
immunophages by  an unknown process, and transcribe and adopt data gene 
sequences despite the  supposed incompatibility of same. So little was 
understood about the  phenomenon that the info packet, despite its 
reams of supporting data,  occupied me for only about twenty minutes. 
Anyway, I was no doctor, and most  of the jargon went right past me, 
leaving little more information than  Lottick had given me verbally. Of 
more interest was the data on the ship  itself; Louis Pasteur was at 
heart a light cargo ship, ladder-down-powered  and capable of extended 
voyage at interplanetary velocities, though the mass  of the 
"t-balance" hull coatings did cut into performance a bit.
     Normally crewed by four to five people, these ships, though 
Pasteur her  self would carry six. Or seven, if I agreed to join them.
     And that was the question, now, wasn't it? Could I do that, leave  
Ganymede behind, leave the whole Immunity behind to dive back into the 
warmth  of the inner system? Protected from the mycora only by an 
experimental  technology, protected from my crew-mates only by a 
curtain-thin cabin wall? 
     The ship's interior was slightly smaller than my tiny house in 
Philusburg,  and the mission would last 280 days, or just a hair over 
nine months. It  sounded like a boarding-school nightmare, a crowded, 
bickering nightmare of  bunk-bed privacy and no possibility of escape. 
No possibility even of a walk  to cool off, to let anxiety clear slowly 
from the air. How could we keep from       murdering each other? God 
knew, such things had happened before.
     My revulsion was so sharp and so immediate that I realized in a 
sudden,       scharfblick moment that the decision was already made.
     Guess what, friend, I would be going on the mission; these things 
would  happen, would become my daily reality. And how could it be 
otherwise? I  neither loved nor hated reporting; I ,;as it. Always had 
been, even as an  Earthly child, running around with a transcription 
palmtop and a mouthful of  pestering questions. Cobblering was an 
uneasy compromise, something I could  do well enough to be of use to 
others, but when offered the chance to serve       mankind in my own 
true way, with my own true talents, could I refuse?
     Certainly not, I realized. Certainly not. So whatever the records 
may  say, my journey began precisely at that moment.
     The car sped on, hurtling now through the downward leg of the 
tunnel's  parabola. I took the opportunity to flash in an update from 
my net channels,  the four that I moderated and the four others to 
which I made daily  contributions. Skimming the topic headers, sorting 
them into priority groups  for later viewing. Not enough time to read 
them now, of course, not before  landing, but I did compose a message 
of my own, a brief narration and video       collage of the Louis 
Pasteur, its mission, and my own proposed role.
     I flashed it out just as the lights came up, along with the 
warning  chimes, as the ballista on the Philusburg end caught me in its 
decelerating  grip. I fell softly against the padded wall and quickly 
began growing heavy,  and then heavier, and heavier still, and then the 
pressure eased back just  before it could grow uncomfortable, just 
before the need to breathe and the  difficulty of doing so could become 
alarming. Leaving me to drift to my feet  at standard gravity, 
feather-light by the standards of my youth.
     Light spilled into the car as it clamshelled open, releasing me 
onto the  empty platform, and as I stepped away the vehicle sank into a 
recess in the  tunnel wall, to be loaded onto the outbound ballista 
back to Ansharton.
     I looked around briefly at the mirrored walls, my own reflection  
distorted beyond recognition by the rounded contours, by the light 
pouring  up from below. Finally, I found a slot to shove my debit card 
into, then  mounted the escalator and rode it down to street level. 
Philusburg blossomed  around me, a smaller town than Ansharton but in 
many ways a more energetic  one, its sidewalks mobile, its buildings 
designed, in many cases, to change  shape over the course of the day, 
taking advantage of shifts in the lighting  conditions. My home, these 
past twenty years, a cavern-city of lead and iron  and sparkling gold, 
and yes, I did love it. And do.
     It was funny how different the houses all looked from one another.
     Nobody likes iron shingle all that much, it's true, but the waste 
metal  has to go somewhere, and buildings have to be made of something, 
and in the  end the crews simply click a house together from standard 
patterns, because  they don't have the time to waste any more than you 
or I do. But in  Philusburg, more and more residents were bucking the 
system and customizing,  adding molded Tudor facings or shiny filigrees 
or little silver gargoyles, or  whatever. They say time is the heaviest 
metal, and indeed only absurd  sacrifice can bring these things about. 
But sacrifice gets to be a habit  after a while. Even I had felt the 
pinch a few years back, and slapped a coat       of paint on my little 
tin castle. Green.
     I'd be passing it in a few minutes if I continued down the 
hauptstrasse,  but it seemed I wouldn't have the factory job to worry 
about much longer, so  once my feet hit the sidewalk I switched tracks 
and went the other way, not  back to work but instead toward the 
sanitarium on the city's south end, near  the archway to the 
agricultural district. There was someone I needed to  see.
     "Take those damn glasses off," she said to me by way of greeting 
about  as friendly a reception as she'd been able to manage lately.
     Seeming never to notice that I'd been gone at all, seeming always 
to  pick up in the middle of a conversation. But not any conversation 
that I  remembered.
     A ribbon held back her hair, white on white.
     So small, this room, and so sparse, and so very painfully clean. 
My  fault, yes; I was always thinking I should at least bring her a 
plant,  something dirty and alive to fill up the empty space beside the 
window, but  there was the expense to consider, and the trouble...
     "Momma," I said to her, as cheerfully as I could manage, "you know 
 they're not glasses. Nobody wears glasses anymore."
     She pinched her face up at that. "Bull crap. I see you all hiding 
behind  these things, hiding your faces. Always poking and stabbing at 
the air like  there were flies buzzing around, bothering you. But 
they're not." Her eyes  narrowed, studying my face with sullen 
accusation. "You're not going to poke  at me, are you? I see these 
orderlies hiding behind their beards and their  Coke-bottle glasses, 
always poking and pointing. What are they hiding from,  and who are 
they pointing at? It's annoying, and they look like fools.
     I'll speak to somebody about it, I really will."
     "Momma," I said, the bright edge still on my voice, but duller 
now,  "I don't work here. I'm John, I'm your son."
     "I know exactly who you are," she snapped.
     I wondered. My mother was almost ninety years old, physically 
still  healthy enough, but mentally ... "She's simply outlived her 
brain's ability  to cope with new pathways," as one of the nurses had 
put it, by which she  meant that the neurodegenerative agent had not 
been identified and probably  would not be. As if age made a human 
being any less entitled to dignity and  health? I was genuinely afraid 
to ask for clarification on this point,  genuinely afraid to be told 
that Momma was just too old, that no  intervention could fix her.
     Or worse, that fixing her was too expensive, that nature had 
written her  off and the Immunity was simply standing by, waiting for 
the sentence to be       carried out. "We simply haven't the 
resources..."
     We never did, never do. Christ, I couldn't even come up with a  
houseplant. I resolved to remedy that, to fix what little I could in 
her       life. It was, as we say, the least I could do.
     "How are you, Momma?"
     "I'm fine, I'm fine. Not dead yet." She grimaced, shaking her 
head,  patting the bed beside her to invite me to sit. "I sure outlived 
what I ever  guessed I would. This is Jupiter, isn't it? Are we living 
on Jupiter?"
     "On Ganymede, Momma. It's one of the moons."
     "Ganymede," she said, testing the word, nodding slowly as if 
agreeing  with the sound of it. "Yeah, okay. One of the moons. 
Philusburg, that's where  we live. Are we still in Philusburg?"
     "Yup," I told her, smiling, sitting down on the bed now and 
patting her  hand because I couldn't think of anything else to do, any 
other way to  connect.
     God, but it drained me to visit here. Momma used to be smart, used 
to be  able to talk backwards and write backwards and figure out which 
flavor of  syrup would take the rust off an iron tile. She'd gotten us 
through the  Evacuation, the whole family, by drawing the right 
conclusions and jumping at  the right time and somehow making a grand 
adventure of it all. But then Avery  had died in a bloom, and Patrice 
in a fire, and then my father simply failed  to wake up one morning, 
and a little more had gone out of her each time. 
     Sick.
     Momma was sick, and gradually getting sicker, and I'd taken much 
too  long to figure it out. Sometimes I thought she was dead already, 
an empty  shell of flesh and nerve, speaking only in echoes. How long 
ago should I  have said goodbye?
     "Momma," I said to her then, in a strong voice that I hoped would  
penetrate, "I have to go away for a while. I have to go on a trip, and 
I  won't be able to see you while I'm gone. I can send messages, 
though,  and you can send messages back."
     She seemed to consider my words.
     "I can talk to the staff about it," I went on slowly. "I know you 
don't  like the zee-spec, but that's okay; I can send you a plaintext 
or an audio  mail, and someone can play it for you. And you can reply, 
if you want  to."
     She was nodding, looking thoughtful, but the hand she raised was 
an  instruction to silence. "Do you remember your father's accident?'' 
she asked,  a wise, distant glint in her eyes. "Wild parrots. He drove 
up into the  mountains, and wild parrots ate his windshield wipers. 
Heaven knows, but  those parrots have a serious appetite for rubber, 
and when he was driving  back down, it rained and he couldn't see, and 
he crashed. Drove right into a       tree, I think, though it may have' 
been a rock."
     "I remember. It was a road sign he hit."
     Her brown eyes caught mine, held them. She was smiling. "I told 
him,  man, you might have been the first person in the history of the 
world to ever  be killed by parrots. What a funny thing that was. 
Killed by parrots, can you  imagine? But he lived a long time after 
that. A long time. He used to love to       tell that story."
     Yes, indeed he did. There had been a lot more to it, back then, 
though  the exact details had tended to wander from one telling to the 
next. My  father had been a systems analyst, "long for handyman" as 
he'd liked to say,  though the Immunity had put him to work making 
shoes, same as me. "Shoes are       important in low gravity," he'd 
often said, "and not so easy to make  well."
     "Arthur always loved the mountains," Momma went on, smiling 
fondly.
     "And the animals, and the sky. We didn't Evacuate many animals 
with us,  did we?
     Of course there wasn't much time--it's hard to blame us when the 
hills  around the spaceport were literally dissolving but I don't think 
your father  was ever really happy after we left. He was never really 
the same."
     Yeah, losing a whole planet--and later a whole inner solar 
system--can  do that to you. Hence the love even now--perhaps 
especially now--of that  damned parrot story. See here, we really knew 
the Earth in our time there. I  sighed. "Momma, we can talk about Dad 
if you want, but first I want you to  listen to me. I have to go away. 
I have to go on a trip.
     Are you listening? Do you understand what I'm saying? Momma?"
     Momma, Momma. I couldn't stop saying the word, though I never 
heard my  own name in return anymore. Perhaps a need to remind her that 
I, too, was a  part of her memories. Or maybe I was reminding myself, 
or maybe it's a lot  more complex than that, or a lot simpler. Love is 
a twisted thing, not  for us to decipher. She was my mother.
     "I'm listening," she said, the smile falling away. "You're going 
on a  trip, all right. People go on trips sometimes; it's nothing to 
get bent  up about. Is it a long trip? Far away?"
     I nodded. "Yes, a long one. Almost a year."
     "Ah-hah." She paused, looked down. "I don't know. I don't know. 
Maybe I  won't... I think I'm sick, you know. I think there's 
definitely something  wrong with me. Maybe it's my memory, it does seem 
to play tricks, but  that's not quite the same thing as feeling ill, if 
you know what I mean.
     Do you think I'll still be here when you get back? A year from 
now,  well, that's a long time to the elderly."
     "Of course you will," I said, too quickly. And compounded the 
error  by patting her hand again.
     And I knew then that Momma wasn't altogether gone, because she 
looked up  sharply, snatching away her hand. "Don't you talk down to 
me, young fellow. 
     I won't be talked down to like that, condescended to, you hear me? 
And take  those damn glasses off. You look just exactly like a fool."
     That night, I pored over Lottick's files for nearly an hour, long 
enough  to put together a more detailed mission description and flash 
it to my net  channels to feed the curiosity there. Lottick's blatant 
flattery aside, I was  not the only commentator or historian in the 
Immunity. Far from it. I can  think of nine serious ones right off the 
top of my head (and you all know who  you are), another twenty or 
thirty dabblers, and of course the thousands of       contributors to 
the unmoderated channels.
     VR mail had been trickling in for me all day, messages of 
congratulation  and commiseration and frank curiosity. I answered 
several of these at length,       answered more with a form letter. 
There were some jealous inquiries as  well.
     Why me, they wondered aloud? Why not someone else, someone perhaps 
with  a more rugged or more technical background? One of these, though 
biting, was  actually very funny, so I archived it and made a note to 
get in touch with       its author, when I'd had time to build up the 
necessary reserve of wit.
     And then, as every evening, I read my net channels, perused city  
records, made a few discreet realtime calls, and flashed the comm 
network  with info and opinion nuggets--the worlds according to John 
Strasheim.
     "... fourteen deaths last week, and only nine births, which is  
consistent with annual statistics. and yet, two-thirds of Immunity 
citizens  remain unmarried, and more than half of those claim to be 
seeking romantic  alliances without success. No surprise that the 
'Bolla Stranger' holiday  proposal was shot down in council, but if we 
hope to stave off a slow  extinction we had better find a way to get 
our men and women together outside  of working hours. Or maybe we all 
just need to lower our standards a  bit..."
     "... yet another warehouse robbery, this time for eight thousand 
g.u.
     in bismuth bar stock. How the perpetrators managed to carry it all 
away  unnoticed is a mystery to this berichter, but sources indicate 
one or more       city vehicles may have been involved..."
     "... in the Floral asteroids at the Main Belt's lower edge, 
Gladholder  communities report a net food surplus for the twelfth 
consecutive year,  despite near-record spore flux from the upper 
Mycosystem . . . " Et cetera. 
     Finally, more tired even than usual, I fell gratefully into bed 
and  drifted off at once.
     And burst awake half an hour later, fumbling the lights on and 
grabbing  my zee-spec off the charging rack to send, in literal 
afterthought, a message  to Vaclav Lottick, informing him that I'd 
considered his very kind offer, and       had chosen to accept.

     THREE
     EVOLUTION'S AdMIRERS

     Originally headquartered in Radar
Valley, a tiny dome town on the surface of Callisto, the Temples of
Transcendent Evolution have managed over the past two decades to 
colonize nearly every  corner of the Immunity, from the outposts 
(Saturn to the Five Cities of  Ganymede. But in Innensburg, their 
branch temple was burned to the ground  last year with magnesium flares 
and other sophisticated pyrotechnics, despite  round-the-clock watches 
following three previous arson attempts.
     "It's an awful thing, human spite," says longtime Temples 
spokeswoman  Jeanine Proust, when I stop by the reconstruction site to 
interview her. The  trademark binary caduceus emblem is already in 
place, raised gold on a  burnished silver pillar, and Proust leans 
against it as she speaks, her body  language protective and angry and 
tired. "The authorities avert their eyes,       of course, or this 
couldn't have happened at all, much less gone unsolved.
     That building was raised and maintained by hands, you know, by 
loving  human hands, and it contained thousands of g.u. in original 
artwork and  fixtures, many of them originally from Earth itself. The 
sentimental value  alone is incalculable. How do you go about healing a 
loss like that?"
     "It's an awful thing, the Temples of Transcendent Evolution,'' 
counters       another source, an Innensburg resident who has asked to 
remain anonymous.
     "They want to 'commune,' they can bloody well do it someplace 
else,  someplace where it isn't a bloody salt tablet stitched up in the 
wounds. Be a  long time before we'll put up with that nonsense, believe 
you me. You've  really got to wonder just who these people think they 
are."
     It odds, of course, is the Temples' interest in TGL generally and 
the  Mycosystem in particular. Not proper, one supposes, not healthy,   
    although neither are the fear and divisiveness they so frequently 
inspire.
     The polite fiction these days is that we in the Immunity are all 
one  people, united by one culture, one history. is the joke goes, our 
official  language is English with a Swiss accent, and if there are 
racists or  nationalists among us, they keep exceedingly quiet.
     and why not? against the backdrop of the Mycosystem, what 
difference a  human gene twisted this way or that? Even religious 
tolerance has come back  into vogue; the western faiths quibble over 
similarities rather than  differences, and seem to view the remaining 
animhts and polytheists with, if  not respect, at least a sort of 
good-natured neglect.
     The Temples are quite another matter; the organization's religious 
 nature, which many feel to be a mask for quasi-legal scientific 
research, is  seen as a provocation, a blatant stab at the moral 
foundations of our  communities.
     "I'm not going to lie to you, "Jeanine Proust tells me with a 
defiant  jutting of the chin. "Most of our members come to us because 
they sense a  spiritual chasm in their lives, because they sense the 
proximity of a  presence far greater than themselves, and they want to 
learn more. Yes, many  are undereducated. Yes, many bring money along 
with them, and yes, we do  funnel quite a lot of that into our research 
arm. Exploitation is a very  subjective judgment, though, and we're no 
more guilty of it than any other  large organization.
     "Like it or not, the Mycosystem is an enormous reality in our 
lives, and  if the more established religions have no meaningful 
observations regarding  that, then it is time for the established 
religions to give way to a more  relevant paradigm. People come to us 
because unlike those religions of the  past, we're the only ones 
willing to admit that there's an elephant in  the living room."
     Not strictly true--Rev. Stacia Holt's Creation Murmurs being the 
most  prominent counterexample--but [ let the point pass. "Some people, 
"I tell her  instead, "accuse the Temples of going too far. The 
psychotropics, the  fecundity rituals, the Confessions of lwe. .
     . Some suggest that the Mycosystem has become an object of actual  
worship among your followers."
     She shakes her head. 'No, I'm sorry, that would be stating it far 
too  strongly. The spiritual implications of complexity on so vast a 
scale are  simply not known. Ifa mycoric soul exists down there in that 
fractal  wilderness, our apprehension of it must be fragmentary at 
best, though of  course that doesn't stop us from trying. At this 
juncture we don't have  enough information to worship the Mycosystem, 
or God, or anything really. 
     It's a frontier that can only be explored when we're brave enough 
to let a  bloom run its course, the occurrence of which seems very 
unlikely in the  current climate. But this is all very easy for 
outsiders to misunderstand. '  "I agree, " I say to her, fighting to 
hold my temper, my impartiality  suddenly strained just a bit too far. 
"I doubt I've understood you at all. I  don't see you people 
vacationing on Mars. I don't see you volunteering to die  in a bloom. 
Isn't apprehending spiritual truths a little empty if it isn't       
backed up by actual deeds?"
     wIth this, she flashes a kind of disappointed smile--I've got her 
and  she knows it. She seems as familiar with the question as she is 
uncomfortable, and when she speaks, it's in a humbler, almost 
apologetic tone. "Mr. Strasheim, we have decades of study ahead of us. 
The Immunity focuses its energies in the wrong direction, in an 
aggressive and ultimately futile direction, and we would like to see 
that changed. But we aren't stupid, and we haven't transcended our 
inherent human/animal nature. We live stairs from the very greatest of 
unknowns--the inner planets transformed  almost beyond comprehension, 
the vacuum itself brought elaborately to life.
     Who can say what our place is in all of this? Is it so surprising, 
that deep down we're as afraid as you?"
     from [nnensburg and the Fear of Failure Back at the factory, I 
was greeted with hoots and catcalls as the guys looked up from their 
machines. Schmidt, Billings, and Howe.
     "Hey!"
     "There he is, the Big Wheel himself!"
     "Hi, guys," I said, ducking my head. My journalism hobby was well 
known, but it had never interfered with work before, and the drama of 
its doing so yesterday was as appealing to them as it was to me. More, 
probably, because they didn't have to go anywhere as a result.
     Julf Ernst, my shift supervisor for the last five years, stepped 
away from his paste-and-stitch press, came forward and pumped my hand, 
a solicitous grin stretching out beneath his bushy mustache.
     Strasheim the visiting dignitary, yeah. "So what'd they say?" he 
asked.
     "I, ul, need a leave of absence." "Yeah? Where're they sending 
you?"
     I snorted, amused to be able to shock him as deeply as I was about 
to. "Earth," I said.
     He blinked.
     "I need ten months, starting immediately. They have some kind of 
new ship."
     He blinked again. "Seriously?"
     "Yeah."
     The machines had gone quiet, their operators all looking 
goggle-eyed at me.
     Ernst pumped my hand again. "Jesus. Well done, then. I always knew 
you'd leave us one day. I always said that, didn't I?"
     "Sure," I agreed, although he never had.
     He cocked his head, a gesture which managed somehow to point to 
everything at once--low ceiling, the rusted floor, the reeking vats of 
glue and rubber, the guys..."You gonna leave all this?"
     "Won't be easy," I assured him.
     He nodded, approving of the remark. "One thing: you've got to have 
a drink with us after the shift. Down at the Engel."
     The guys nodded. Yeah, yeah, mumble whatsis, drink at the Engel.
     "I'd like that," I said. "What time should I meet you there?"
     "Meet?" Ernst quirked his face up. "I thought we'd all walk down 
there together. You know, after the shift."
     I saw where that was heading, and moved to intercept. "I have to, 
ah, get my affairs in order. Close up the house, that sort of thing.
     I report for training first thing in the morning."
     Ernst's expression was long-suffering and tired. "We had a big 
spike of orders come in on Monday, you know that. We're an hour and a 
half into a shift of twelve, for which you never called in late, and 
now I'm supposed to press out eighty-nine units with only four guys? 
Don't do this to me, Johnny boy."
     "Do what? How are you going to manage tomorrow?"
     "We'll manage tomorrow. Get somebody in off another shift, I don't 
know.
     It's right now I'm worried about, Johnny. Nobody goes barefoot on 
this planet; that's a responsibility I take very seriously."
     His face and voice were profoundly sincere, and the funny thing 
is, he was right. Ganymede was not a forgiving place, and the demands 
of life here did not allow for much error or idleness or want. People 
needed shoes, clothing, food, needed something every day, and somebody 
had to be there to     provide it all. Nobody went barefoot, ever.
     That was how I got talked into spending one more day at the press. 
Julf Ernst could do that to you. It's why they made him supervisor, I 
guess.
     As promised, we all marched down to the Engel together when it was 
over and the eighty-nine pairs were drying on the rack. Didn't say 
much, though.
     The Engel, dark and moody as usual, had only a couple of patrons 
besides us, people eating dinner rather than drinking, so the silence 
got fairly oppressive as we stared at each other across the iron table 
and sipped our beers. It pained me--this was costing a good bit, 
probably three days' pay when all was said and done, and I really did 
appreciate the sentiment. The guys and I had worked together for most 
of a decade and a half, and spent twelve hours of six days of fifty-one 
weeks a year standing practically shoulder to shoulder. But when you 
got right down to it, apart from commenting on the quality of the beer 
we didn't really have all that much to say to each other.
     Hindsight filter: we could have talked about families, or 
politics, or money, or anything really. We just didn't. Didn't know 
how.
     It was Ernst who saved us, who single-handedly took on the burden 
of speech.
     He raised a hand, showed it to us, then pressed it to the table's 
faux-woodgrain surface and slid it around in a circle, as if feeling 
the  texture of the metal.
     "Every surface," he said, "is totally covered in macrophages. 
That's our line of defense. That's what separates us from Gladholders 
and dead Earthlings, what defines our whole society. We breathe these 
things, we totally trust them with our lives. Isn't that right, 
Johnny?"
     I supposed that it was.
     "Down in the Mycosystem," he went on, his fat mustache waggling, 
"there are no macrophages. That's what defines its existence. That's 
why it's all turned to goo. You ask me, we're just not making enough 
macrophages. Immunize  the whole solar system, that's what I say."
     "I'm not sure it works that way," I said uncertainly.
     "No?" He shrugged. "I've always wondered. I guess they would have 
done it by now if they thought they could. So what about this mission 
of yours?
     What's that about? You going to capture back some territory for 
us?"
     I shook my head, swallowed some dark, rich been "No, just a 
scouting mission. Placing some instruments."
     "That's all?" He seemed surprised, disappointed. The guys grumbled 
their agreement with that sentiment.
     "I guess so, yeah."
     "Huh. Weird. You'd think if they were going to go to the trouble, 
it'd be for something more dramatic. But what do I know, right?
     Nothing.
     That's why I'm stuck in shoe heaven. Anyway, Johnny, we're surely 
going to miss you." "Likewise," I said. "You'll keep in touch?"
     "Yes. Actually, that's my job."
     "Oh, yeah. Right."
     And that, sad to report, was about all the conversation we had in 
us that night. Herodotus, I hear, was no great conversationalist 
either.

     FOUR
     A CAPITAL SHIP

     Base, town, factory, port, whatever
Galileo may be, the first thing you notice about it is the peculiar
nature of the cold. Warm air blasts through the corridors, drying the 
eyes and mucous membranes, roughing up the throat, and yet the walls... 
Touch them for a moment and the cool is refreshing, for longer, and you 
may lose some skin. Layered composite/ceramic nearly a meter thick, 
they are fine thermal insulators, but the temperature in the rock  
outside is barely seventy kelvins, and it seeps.
     Same goes for the floors and ceilings, so as I wandered in search 
of the shipyards that day, my feet and scalp were telling me I was 
cold, even as sweat drenched and stained the armpits of my shirt. Well, 
"wandered" is not really the right word, since a detailed map scrolled 
and swiveled on my zee-spec as I negotiated the hallways. But alongside 
it was a slow, plaintext news dump, with low-volume narration mumbling 
from the earpieces, and anyway I was taking the long way around, in no 
hurry and in fact under orders (well, suggestions) to gather 
information from any and all sources.
     "Whatever seems appropriate," the message had said. "Whatever 
helps you do your job, do. We're paying for your judgment in these 
matters, so exercise it."
     A light tour of Galileo, then, a bit of context for all that is to 
follow.
     Alas, there isn't much to tell. If you've been there, you know the 
town (factory? base?) is a rat hole, a maze of tunnels and chambers 
that look and      smell like they've been pummeled with hand tools and 
hosed down with oil. You      get that sort of look when ten thousand 
residents, none of them permanent, pass through their work contracts 
here like boarding-school students, unencumbered by love or respect for 
their surroundings. Too close to the equator here, too close to the 
surface. It's not that it feels unsafe--in fact, Galileo probably has 
the best Immune and Response systems in existence.
     It's not that there isn't enough money flowing through; the heavy 
elements on Ganymede are mainly imported through these very docks. It's 
not, as some have claimed, a lack of"feminine touch," as something like 
a third of the residents are in fact female.
     The problem is Galileo itself; remoteness is part of the identity 
of the place, part of its history. Never mind that it's as easy to 
reach now as any other part of Ganymede, and certainly much easier than 
Callisto or, God help us all, Titan. It just never has been "home" to 
anyone, and for that reason it never will be. Some places are just like 
that.
     Oh, all right, the place is not entirely without its charm. The 
food is mostly synthetic, don't ask me why, but an ethic of rebellion 
has taken hold of the culinary centers, leading to a cuisine which is 
certainly very different from anything else you're likely to see. 
Anti-naturalism at its most refined: my lunch, eaten at a corner stand 
with twice as many diners as stools, consisted of chewy blue spheres 
with vaguely meatlike flavor, steeped in a sweet, translucent gravy 
that tasted chemical, medicinal. This was ladled onto a mound of 
starchy pellets and served in an iron cup, with an oversized spoon and 
a glass of water and a napkin of dubious cleanliness.
     Good? No, not really. But different.
     Need I say more about the town itself? I think not. Eventually, I 
found my way to the relatively open spaces of the shipyard, where the 
ceilings were higher, the walls farther apart, the crowds less hurried 
and surly.
     It's a methodical business, the building and servicing of 
spaceships, and this was immediately apparent in the look and feel of 
the place. Large, complicated tools, pushed or carried with delicacy. 
Unexplained power cables running here and there, but stapled to the 
walls, out of the way of tripping feet.
     And signs everywhere, warning and exhorting: ABSOLUTELY NO 
ADMITTANCE, THIS MEANS YOU!!! CAUTION: LASER LIGHT. CAUTION: ELECTRIC 
FIELD.
     CAUTION: LIGHT FROM WELDING ARCS CAN DAMAGE YOUR EYE. There were 
even a few weirdly encouraging ones, such as PLEASE MOVE SAFELY and 
WORK WITHOUT EATING MAY CAUSE DIZZINESS.
     True enough.
     The scale and clutter of the place were a bit daunting. It 
actually took me a few minutes to realize that the great shapes all 
around, in every hangar and chamber, surrounded by frames and trusses 
and hoists and quietly industrious people, were in fact real ships and 
not mock ups or test articles or large pieces of support machinery. The 
strange openings in the ceiling were doors leading up into tunnels 
leading up into airlocks leading up into hard cold vacuum. I found the 
thought strangely sobering.
     Louis Pasteur was coming together on Platform 28, and the zee map 
guided me there without error. Like the other ships, Pasteur was 
imprisoned in rigging and scaffolding. I'd seen her blueprints many 
times by now, and from what I could see she looked just like them. And 
yet... Well, there was still something odd, something vaguely 
disturbing about the look of her. The hull was bumpy, spiky, almost 
protozoan in appearance--that much I'd been prepared for. But the 
t-balance tactile camouflage, designed to trick technogenic lebenforms 
into thinking it part of their own substance, was clearly more than a 
simple coating of paint.
     How to describe it? The way it caught the light, the way it 
gleamed...
     Pictures do no justice. Rainbow gray it was, like oil on water, 
except that it semed to be made up of thousands of tiny dots, except 
that as I came closer, the dots broke up into millions of smaller dots, 
then millions more, smaller and smaller until it hurt the eye. They 
gave a vague impression of motion, like ants. Yes, I remember ants, 
remember looking down on their nests as they swarmed over some hapless 
insect, their bodies too tiny to make  out individually, at least from 
a distance, so that the mass of them had the look of a living, boiling, 
fractal whole. T-balance looked a lot like that, in a way, although I 
understood at once that the motion was an illusion, that if I kept my 
head and eyes perfectly still the strangeness would evaporate, and the 
hull's coating would settle into a sort of wet, pointillist glaze.
     From a ramp on Pasteur's underside, behind the cables and 
scaffolding, voices emanated. I peered, drawing closer, and was able to 
make out faces: Vaclav Lottick and two men I didn't recognize, both 
dressed in eye-blue spacer coveralls. Lottick looked up, saw me.
     "Strasheim," he said curtly. "Over here."
     Yes, of course, I might have trouble picking out the right ship in 
the crowd.
     "I'd like you to meet someone," he went on, nudging one of the 
other men out into the light. Then all three of them were picking their 
way through scaffolding, approaching me with hands extended. "Darren 
Wallich, John Strasheim. John Strasheim, Darren Walhch.
     "Aha," I said, nodding to the tall, pepper-haired man Lottick had 
indicated and accepting the handshake he offered. Firm, too firm. "A 
pleasure to meet you."
     Darren Wallich was an Immunity type of some sort, a doctor, and 
would be Pasteu's captain when the time came. One of the six people I'd 
be  sharing the next umpty-ump weeks with--I'd better be pleased to 
meet him.
     Wallich's face, draped loosely in the manner of faces entering 
their fifth or sixth decade, drew upward into a smile at my expression, 
as if aware of what I was thinking. Probably he was thinking the same 
thing.
     "This other man is Tosca Lehne," Lottick said to me, flapping a 
hand in the air between us as if trying to form some invisible 
connection. Maybe doing something meaningful on his zee-spec, or maybe 
not. It's hard not to notice that these devices, so rarely removed, 
have brought us a whole new body language, have encouraged us more than 
ever to speak with our hands, to sketch invisible lines in the air 
whether or not they'll be turned into real      lines in the specs of 
our audience.
     "Hallo," Lehne said to me, and I shook his hand as well. This man 
seemed more reluctant, more truculent. He was the inventor of 
t-balance, or one of the inventors, but I didn't know much more about 
him than that. His arms were thick and hairless, his jaw square, the 
pads of his hand disconcertingly soft. Too many years, I thought, of 
working only with abstractions, of lifting his weight against too 
little gravity. A hard, still-youthful body gone reluctantly to flab.
     "You don't sound happy," I observed.
     "He doesn't like this idea much," Wallich said, grinning. "Leaving 
home for the mission and all, but hey, I wanted to be sure we had the 
best possible job on the camouflage, so I suggested he come along with 
us to be sure. I bet that's worth a few extra minutes' cross-checking, 
eh?" He laughed.
     Tosca Lehne did not appear amused. Well, who could blame him? I 
wasn't thrilled at our prospects myself.
     "Well, we're happy to have both of you aboard," Lottick said to 
Lehne and myself, in the same tone of official friendliness I'd heard 
back at his office. "This'is a fine crew we're putting together, a fine 
crew. I couldn't put my trust in better hands."
     His tone was not a bad one, I hasten to add. Manipulative, yes, 
but there was a conspiratorial edge to it as well, as if the 
manipulation were a private joke between the three of us.
     Wallich chuckled. "We can be spared, you mean."
     "No." Lottick grew more serious. "Not at all. Not at all."
     "Some have better things to do," Lehne muttered.
     Lottick eyed him for a moment, but seemed not to find the remark 
worthy of comment. Instead he turned, speaking now in lower, quicker 
tones.
     "Wallich, I've got six test batches to run this afternoon and only 
half a team to meter them. I've stayed too long already, so I'll be on 
my way posthaste. I'd like you to geek a sim for me, clean up the 
activity reports     and flash them down priority, yes? I'll read them 
on the job."
     "Not a problem."
     "Well, nice seeing you again," Lottick said, nodding dismissively 
in my     direction. "We have the highest confidence."
     "Welcome aboard," Wallich agreed. "We'll talk later in detail, if 
that's all right. Get to know each other, discuss your duties, all that 
sort of thing.
     Fair enough for you?"
     I nodded. "Yeah, whatever's convenient."
     He pointed his hand, pistol-style, his grin broadening. "I like 
that attitude. Whatever's convenient, ha ha. Mind if I archive that? 
Bang." The thumb/hammer fell. Then, as he and Lottick turned away, 
"Vass, this A-series, right? Fern loop blastoma, step rate 
unconstrained? God damn, you've got a fun night ahead of you. Here, 
I'll walk you as far as the foundry. I'm headed that way anyway."
     "Blastoma shmastoma," muttered Lottick's receding voice. "Give me. 
half a g.u. for every damn fool tumor snipe hunt I've wasted nights on 
and I'll buy this ship. Severs has a lecture coming, let me tell you."
     "Oh, I can imagine well enough."
     The sound of Wallich's laughter followed them out.
     I turned to Tosca Lehne. "Our captain, eh? He seems a bit...
     energetic. Funny. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but--" 
"Prosthetic," Lehne said, staring after the two men. "Excuse me?"
     "That sense of humor, it's a tickle capacitor. Implanted, skull 
base. The man is a fish."
     "A what?"
     Lehne waved a hand. "You know, cold-blooded. Slimy. He did it so 
people would like him better."
     I blinked, puzzled. Clearly, I hadn't been following the science 
and medical channels closely enough. "Tickle capacitor. My god, that's 
amazing.
     And do they?"
     "Eh?"
     "Like him better?"
     "Oh. Yeah, I guess. He's captain, isn't he?"
     "My god, that's amazing. Can they do, well, for example, something 
like a conscience? Or a sense of self-worth? The social implications 
could be staggering."
     "I don't know."
     A shrug; no real response, no emotional engagement. The question 
didn't interest him. Well, I could see that Tosca Lehne wasn't going to 
be the easiest person in the worlds to talk to. Maybe Wallich was not 
the only one in need of prosthetic laughter. Thinking to try a 
different approach, to get Lehne talking about his work, I reached out 
to brush my fingers admiringly along Louis Pasteu?s t-balance hull. I 
pulled them back immediately, stinging. Qick inspection showed that 
they were bleeding: little jewels of red beading out from dozens of tin 
slash wounds, as if I'd touched a tangle of miniature razor blades. I 
gave a little grunt.
     "Careful," Lehne said quietly. "It's sharp."
     I showed him a surly grin. "So I see. You might have warned me.
     He shrugged. "Didn't know you'd try to touch it. Yes, it's 
sharp--be careful. Also toxic, mildly radioactive. Don't eat. You know 
much about it?"
     "No, not really."
     "Oh," he said, and then just stood there eyeing me over. To his 
credit, he did look apologetic--not seeming to know quite what to make 
of me, what to say to me, what to do about me. I was not part of his 
world.
     "You can explain it to me sometime," I tried, smiling, I hoped, a 
bit more genuinely. "I'm very interested. Meanwhile, is the rest of the 
crew around? I feel I should get to know everyone before..."
     He was shaking his head. "No, not here right now. They come and 
go, busy, always busy, always busy. That's life, eh? Come to dinner 
tonight, that's where you can meet everyone. Man and woman's got to 
eat, right? Might as well synchronize. I'll tell you about t-balance 
sometime, if you really are interested. It's technical, but I'll tell 
it to you. Would you like to see the ship?"
     "Why I'm here," I agreed.
     "Well, watch your head going in. Damn cargo hold, forced a 
redesign of the main airlock. Very urgent, that cargo hold, along with 
everything else.
     Accelerated schedule, no time to reallyfix anything. And for what?
     Dubious."
     I shook my head. "I'm afraid I'm not following."
     "Ah, never mind," he said, turning away. "Nothing makes sense, 
they don't tell me things. This mission stinks, I know that much."
     I've often thought I should have asked him to elaborate on that 
remark.
     Did he mean something beyond the obvious, beyond the danger and 
discomfort, beyond the arm-twisting that had apparently brought him 
here? I didn't ask.
     Instead, I let it roll off me, and followed him docilely into the 
ship.

     -	FIVE
     FOR THE GOOD ARE ALWAYS THE MERRY

     Small, my god it is
small, my god it is small... That was all I could think about as I sat 
down to dinner, all I had thought about all afternoon.
     Wallich had met with me, as promised, and it was all I could do to 
keep from telling him I quit, I couldn't do this, he would have to find 
somebody else.
     Rosenblum? Ancell? Oh, God, not An-cell. The thought of him 
smearing his boastful opinions all over the story, and then strutting 
and crowing at me about it for the rest of his life and mine ... And 
they would get Ancell,      too. Somehow, I knew they would. And so I 
held firm.
     But it was small; the ship's interior was like a bathroom with 
seven shower stalls and a streetcar cockpit wedged incongruously at one 
end, a utility closet wedged in at the other. I'd seen the plans, 
thought I was prepared, but this was crazy./was crazy.
     Large and crowded, the cafeteria nonetheless had a little round 
table reserved for Louis Pasteus crew, right beside the single large 
window overlooking the shipyards. A hell of a view, really; four 
half-completed ships were visible below, and two whole ones presumably 
drydocked for repairs. Louis Pasteur herself was not among them, but 
together they represented three sizes, four overall designs, six color 
schemes, and fully a quarter of Galileo's shipping tonnage. The shop 
floor was enormous, probably a full hectare sprawling some twenty 
meters below us, but still I felt claustrophobic.
     On my zee-spec, images threatened to crowd out the real world 
altogether: paired data gene sequences scrolling upward in tandem, the 
duplicate portions flashing like alarm lights; the Io Sengen and 
Innensburg mycora, pulsing with false-color image enhancements and 
shifting annotations from the library tutorial; a map of the solar 
system, with Louis Pasteu pounds course charted out as a dotted white 
line swinging close by Mars, kissing the orbit of Earth, and then 
finally rising back toward the Immunity, toward the cold and dark of 
the upper solar system.
     And of course, I had a media window cycling slowly and 
methodically through my own net channels as well. A reminder to myself: 
This is where you are going, and why. danger, a mystery, a brass ring 
to be seized. Just stay cool and you'll be a part of it, be right there 
as it unfolds.
     Correspondent, berichter, official historian to the Immunity. Nine 
months of hell and you'll have it all.
     Beside me, Tosca Lehne snorted and banged a cup on the table. 
"Hey, Strasheim, she's talking to you."
     "What?" I looked up, saw that Jenna Davenroy had been speaking to 
me from across the table. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that."
     Shaking loose a few stands of unruly, tin-colored hair, Davenroy 
rolled her eyes and stabbed pale fingers at the air. "I said, what are 
you reading?
     Pardon my nosiness, but what we read at the dinner table says an 
awful lot about us as people."
     "Yeah," Tug Jinacio chipped in, "especially what we read when 
people are trying to meet us. Come on, give with it. Geek it over."
     "It's nothing," I assured them. "Just a little homework."
     "Flash it to me," Jinacio insisted, not quite rudely. His face 
looked as though he'd skipped a day shaving, though his short hair was 
immaculately btu'shed; the tone of voice matched this image perfectly, 
at once careless and deliberate and attentive. He seemed the sort of 
casual charmer who could hover at the edge of rudeness and never quite 
cross it.
     Probably common in his usual circles: he was a Response 
lieutenant, twice decorated, most recently in charge of a unit of eight 
rowdy veterans and a pair of trainees. I'd read through the bio an hour 
or two before, and found it impressive. Nobody called him by the name 
it gave: Christofolo.
     Nobody questioned his right to speak as he pleased.
     The woman, Jenna Davenroy, interested me less. A nuclear engineer 
a little over half my mother's age, she was slated to be Pas-teu/s 
ladderdown expert and chief propulsion monitor. Her bona fides seemed 
more academic in nature; she had rescued no children, but had 
apparently contributed to the body of knowledge that kept the lights 
on, the caverns warm. Just now she was nodding, agreeing with what Tug 
Jinacio had said.
     "What better way to get to know you than rifling through your 
private thoughts? Do please allow us."
     The lines in her face were not numerous, but they cut deep, and 
moved readily when she talked. Her gaze was weighty.
     "Really, it's nothing," I insisted, conscious suddenly of being 
the only one at the table not wearing spacer blues. But I flashed them 
copies of my windows.
     Jinacio whistled. Davenroy's eyebrows went up. "Cluttered," she 
said, her tone amused but also oddly approving.
     I blushed and ducked my head. "I don't usually run so opaque; I'm 
just trying to psych myself up for this. I... I don't know. I saw the 
ship today."
     "Ah," Davenroy said, nodding. "A little anticipatory cabin fever.
     That's normal. I take it you haven't done ship time before?"
     I shuddered, my nostrils filling with the mingled scents of sweat 
and excrement, my ears with the moans of those who'd been confined too 
long to their bunks. Free movement shifts limited to four hours, day 
after day.
     "No," I said quietly, "not since the Evacuation."
     "Doesn't count. Conditions have improved a lot since then. Still, 
the zee is your friend; you should keep that in mind at all times. You 
don't dabble much in visual ideation, I take it? Most people don't." 
"No," I agreed, "I don't."
     "But you have no specific objection to the practice?"
     I shrugged. Ideation was a habit, like sweets or stimulants or 
alcohol, not inherently deviant or harmful in and of itself. Useful in 
the arts and sciences, of course, and practiced by many respectable 
citizens. And yet, most of the Immunity's ideators simply had too much 
time on their hands, and too little energy. Why change the world, or 
even yourself, when you could   craft or purchase fantasy environments 
optimized to your taste and habits?
     Illegal spec mods aside, the eyes and ears could absorb a great 
many pleasurable stimuli--not so different, really, from listening to 
music or going out to the theater or flashing down the occasional VR 
drama. The temptation was an entirely natural one, and suspect for 
precisely that reason. Yes, I had done it from time to time, but not 
often. We had a society to run, now, didn't we?
     "Oh, drink your tea," she said, waggling a finger at me. "Staring 
at  bulkheads for a few weeks will leave you a bit more open-minded."
     "Open-minded? That's a funny phrase to use around this one, isn't 
it?" Another woman had arrived, and presently sat down beside Davenroy.
     I recognized her at once as Renata Baucum, the one Pasteur crew 
member whose exact function I couldn't quite grasp. Veterinarian? 
Zoologist?
     Microbiologist? Her records hinted at all of these things.
     "Hallo," I said to her, setting my cup down and extending a hand.
     "John Strasheim, mission correspondent. You're Baucum?"
     "Quite," she said, flashing white, pointed teeth.
     "Pleasure to meet you," I said. And meant it, too; she was rather 
more striking than her portfolio images had indicated, her long hair 
more silken, her jawline curving more gracefully. Well, who looked good 
in their     ID holographs anyway? I smiled back. "I've been wondering 
about your job."
     She blinked, tapping politely at the empty air between us. "Yes?"
     "Yeah. Well, I mean, what is it? What's your job title going to 
be?"
     "Oh, bioanalyst, I suppose." She looked embarrassed, maybe a 
little annoyed. Her eyes, too, were deeper and more piercing than the 
holograph had shown, coolly reflecting the spacer blue of her 
coveralls. "All the little lebenforms, I just love to see them tick. 
With any luck, I'll be entirely superfluous." Her eyes traveled up and 
down, examining me.
     "And you, a berichter. How interesting. Or do you prefer 
'correspondent'?"
     Despite the smile and the good-natured tone, she had managed 
through careful inflection to make clear that "berichter" and "super 
fluous" were linked concepts, that she was kind enough to speak with 
me, but that I shouldn't take it as any sort of sign of equality. Well.
     I inclined my head politely, to show that her message had been 
understood, and then, taking a moment to peek under the table, I 
matched her tone: "Those shoes you're wearing, miss. Are they 
comfortable?"
     Her thin smile collapsed into blankness and mild confusion.
     "Do they hold your feet down? Provide adequate traction? Are they 
flexible despite their weight?"
     "They're okay," she said, puzzled, eyeing me with suspicion. "I'm 
so very glad," I told her. Their tapered-fan shape, like huge outspread 
toes, gave them away; they were, of course, Philusburg shoes. Mine.
     Tug Jinacio let out a sudden laugh, and then Lehne and Daven-roy 
joined in, and the look on Renata Baucum's face showed her 
understanding that the joke had gotten away from her, that she was 
somehow the butt of it after all.
     Creditably, her smile returned, and she favored me with a new look 
and    message: Very good, sir. I'll be more careful next time.
     Just then, Darren Wallich and another man arrived, set food trays 
down,     occupied the table's last two seats.
     "What's funny?" Wallich wanted to know. Jinacio and Davenroy just 
laughed a little harder, and Wallich seemed unable to keep from joining 
them.
     "Hi!" I called out to the smaller man beside Wallich. "John 
Strasheim.
     Sudhir Rapisardi?"
     "The same," he admitted, and we shook hands across the table. A 
biophysicist, Rapisardi had coordinated the design of the TGL detectors 
so central to Louis Pasteur's mission. I wondered how that must 
feel--having this nine-month party thrown more or less in his honor. I 
would have to remember to ask him sometime. Anyway, he was the last 
crew member I had to meet, so I told him, "I'm very pleased to meet 
you." And meant it.
     Baucum caught sight of something behind me. The laughter around us 
died. Heads turned.
     "Sticks," she muttered, scowling.
     I turned to look. Indeed, a quartet of uniformed police had 
entered the cafeteria, and were strolling among the tables with no 
clear intention of sitting down. Two of them made a discreet but 
careful job of sweeping air,    their sniff wands held out at waist 
level, ticking back and forth.
     "What's happening?" I asked quietly.
     "Security sweep," Baucum said. "Looking for accidents."
     "I'm sorry?
     Captain Wallich, for once, had stopped laughing. "We've had some 
accidents," he said to me. "And some vandalism beyond what's usual. 
Some higher-ups worry there may be a pattern to it, but this is, well, 
counterproductive for one thing. If some fool is monkeywrenching around 
here, it won't be those guys who find it."
     "Vandalism of Louis Pasteur?" I asked.
     "Sometimes," he agreed. "Sometimes not, but our bay does seem to 
have more than its share of problems. Do keep your eyes open, right?"
     I was shaking my head, puzzled. "Who would do a thing like that?
     What's to be gained?"
     "Oh, who the fuck knows." Wallich dug into his food, not amused by 
this subject at all.
     Eventually, the sticks finished their sweep and left the room the 
way they had come in. Looking for what, for the sharp, distinctive reek 
of guilt? Right. Looking for nothing, I decided; probably nothing more 
than a show of force, and misguided as such. Since when had anyone 
taken the sticks seriously? Get a rea/job, friend; if this were a 
po/ice state they'd have hired somebody smarter than you.
     Conversation slowly resumed.
     "It does seem a little misguided," I said to Wallich eventually, 
"strutting around like that. You'd think they'd have more subtlety."
     "Yes," Renata Baucum agreed, her gray eyes hard and glittering. 
"You'd think so. Drop a spy or two in our midst, perhaps?"
     She was looking at me strangely, some muddled combination of 
expectation, contempt, perhaps a hint of unease. Did she think I was a 
political spy? A stick? A saboteur?
     Frowning back at her, I shifted in my seat. "Baucum, I'm recording 
you right now. Bits and pieces of this conversation will find their way 
into a collage, at the very least, and will be shared with thousands of 
readers.
     Does that make you uneasy?"
     'Uneasy?" She considered the word, then nodded. "I'm uneasy that 
this mission has a reporter assigned to it, yes, particularly since our 
objectives  are clearly political rather than scientific, aimed at 
pleasing both inactionist and exterminationist factions. A neat trick! 
Do you know what a mirrored door looks like? It looks like an open 
room. But it isn't; it's a closed room, with a mirror on the door. 
That's what I see when I look at you."
     I blinked, snorted, not sure how to respond. "Am I supposed to 
apologize?"
     The rest of the crew had gone silent, and were watching us with 
interest.
     "You wouldn't know what you were apologizing for," Baucum said. 
"Just never mind. Just forget it."
     I shook my head. "No, you brought this up. I'm listening." "And so 
are thousands of people," she said, more quietly, almost whispering 
now.
     "That's my problem with you. Thousands of people are going to 
think whatever you tell them to think. That everything is safe, that 
changes to the status quo are unwelcome and dangerous?
     I mean, who are you, really?"
     Sighing, I picked up my spoon and shoveled a load of gruel into my 
mouth. "I work in a shoe factory," I said, before I'd quite finished 
chewing.
     "Sometimes, I tell people what I think. That's called 'enlightened 
discourse.'" "I've seen your work," she said, nodding slightly. "Very 
enlightened."
     Suddenly, she sat forward, leaning her elbows on the table. "Let 
me tell you a story, all right? It's about the word 'mycorum,' which 
came into use because when technogenic life first got away from us, the 
earliest examples filled the same ecological niche as most fungi.
     Decomposers, right?
     Start with a complex organic structure, then break it down, burn 
it up, use it to fuel the process of your own reproduction. The 
-eat-bloom-spore cycle was nothing new--the my-cora were just a good 
deal faster about it."
     I gestured politely for her to continue. "Yes? So?"
     "So, when the Earth's biosphere was fully converted, there was 
nothing left to decompose. The mycora should have died, but they 
didn't.
     Instead, they very rapidly evolved photo- and chemosynthetic 
pathways which enabled them to use inorganic matter in their 
reproduction. Becoming like plants, only a great deal more versatile. 
In fact, they've done a much better job of vivifying the Earth than 
organic life ever did."
     "Do you admire them for it? In a Temples kind of way?" I asked, 
suppressing a shudder.
     "Admire?" She scowled. "In a technical sense, yes, of course, but 
you're not going to trap me that easily. I'd like to have the Earth 
back as much as you, believe me, but its current tenants have been very 
effective in asserting their claim."
     I gave her a good hard look, watching my indicators to ensure I 
was recording a good image. "I may be a little dense, Baucum. What is 
your point?"
     Her expression flared, not angry but impatient with me, with my 
presumed ignorance. "The point is that we still call them my-cora. 
Their central functions have changed a trillion times more than our 
attitudes toward them.
     Such blindness may well be the death of us all."
     "And you think this is my fault?"
     She looked down at her food, then back at me. "Your fault? No, I 
suppose, not really. But you're a part "I'm a symbol to you, planted 
here to annoy you. A door with a mirror on it, nothing more. Is that 
it?"
     "Oh, fine," she said, looking up at me again with angry eyes. I'd 
cornered her--not the best way to conduct an interview, or a 
conversation.
     "Fine.
     You're a real person, not a symbol, nobody at all is ierking your 
strings, and the attitudes of society are not your fault. And you have 
a real job, too, so maybe I'm just a bad person for opening my mouth. 
Are we finished?"
     There was a silence about the table for several seconds.
     Embarrassed, I answered as mildly as I could: If you like, yes.
     But if you need an audience for your ideas, I'm always available." 
"How     wonderful," she said.
     Darren Wallich stifled a laugh. Me? I returned to my dinner, 
thinking that somewhere along the line, someone should have tried a 
little harder to find crew members who might actually get along. But 
who'd bother with such frivolities, when there was work to be done? 
Busy, always busy. That's life,      eh?
     After dinner, Tug Jinacio took me aside, stood with me in front of 
the big window overlooking the drydock bays.
     "It isn't too late to back out," he said, his voice noncommittal, 
while managing to avoid any sort of implication. That I was unsafe? 
That I was cowardly? No, it came across as a simple statement of fact, 
in case the idea      hadn't occurred to me. 	I strove to match his 
tone. "I'm fine."
     "This t-balance stuff, you know there's been no testing of it. 
Likely it'll just fail for some reason. Possibly not, right, but I've 
got to live my  life as though that's true. To do my job, I've got to 
make every unfavorable assumption." 	"My own incompetence included?" 
	His answering look was friendly, amused. "Competence I couldn't care 
less about. Not my worry.
     Captain wants you, Captain gets you. It's your calm that concerns 
me.
     Are you calm, John?" 	Calm? How to answer a question like that? 
Say that I'd survived the end of the world, survived the journey here, 
survived the build ing and burrowing of the years that followed? Tell 
him that since that time I'd seen nothing alarming, done nothing 
alarming? That I wept at funerals, no matter the deceased's identity? 
He didn't want to know these things.
     "Maybe," I said to him, somehow not annoyed, "you should shove my 
head in a bucket of cold water, and see how I react. My guess is, I'd 
flail around like mad until I got loose, and then I'd throw a punch or 
two, and then probably back off and start scream ing at you. But it's 
hard to say, really, until it happens. People are funny that way." 	He 
smiled.
     "That's not a bad answer.
     But not a complete one, either." 	"No?" I turned, looked out at 
the gray-black ships in their gray- black drydock berths. There'd be a 
man like Tug on each of these, a man responsible for bloom and fire 
safety, for emergency response in general. The vast majority would come 
from spacer backgrounds, rather than from the Response corps itself, 
but then none of these ships, in their local supply and survey runs, 
would ever face a danger like ours, would ever be quite so immediately 
in harm's way. This questioning, then, was not only warranted, but 
necessary.
     "I'll tell you what," I said. "If anything happens, I'll promise 
to put a high priority on staying out of your way. I think I can 
promise that much, at least."
     He nodded approvingly. "That's all I'm after, John. When things go 
sour, there isn't a lot of time to dick around. If I sense you're a 
liability, I'll have to add you to my list of problems. If not, you can 
be safely ignored, and I mean that in the kindest possible way. I have 
no objection, by the way, to carrying a reporter on the mission. I 
think it's probably a good idea."
     "Good?" I said, unduly flattered by the comment. "Why, exactly?"
     "Hell, friend, if you can't answer that, maybe Captain's asked 
Herr Lottick for the wrong man."
     He clapped me on the shoulder and walked away. It hadn't been an 
insult, hadn't been delivered or received as one. You know how harsh 
words can cement a friendship? As if to say, you and I are close enough 
that these barbs won't come between us. That was what he sounded like.
     I had to admire the trick; few people bothered with it anymore. 
Who, after all, had the time to practice?
     SOMETIMES THEY GET OUT "One-quarter starboard yaw turn," Darren 
Wallich called out.
     "Two-tenths gee-thrust on my command. Go! And... thrust vector 
aligned, intercept course, median consumption trajectory. Right on the 
average, people, give yourselves a gold star."
     Grunts of approval filled the bridge. Four stations here: one for 
Wallich, one for Tosca Lehne, one for Renata Baucum, and, oddly enough, 
one for me as well. A crowded environment, and a confusing, visually 
cluttered one as well: metal bulkheads painted beige, covered here and 
there with text-covered white plastic and sprouting orange seats and 
dark gray control consoles. A bridge designed for zero gravity and not 
meant, particularly, to be understood at a glance.
     Since my actual seat was on the ceiling, and I didn't like to 
strap into it at Ganymedean surface gravity, I had conducted the drill 
standing up between the chairs of Lehne and Baucum, reaching up 
awkwardly for the controls, my arm a little stiff in the uniform which, 
after six days, I still hadn't quite got used to.
     "Nobody's just a reporter on my ship," Wallich had told me several 
times.
     "You can run the resource allocation oversight console. Veto 
authority over information systems and power allocations--any fool can 
handle that."
     Nice to know he had such confidence in me, but then, the job 
actually did appear necessary for the proper functioning of the ship. 
The allocation programs hiccupped rather more often in his rehearsals 
than they would in real life, but when I failed to compensate properly, 
the very best result would be a waste of fuel during maneuvers. The 
worst I wasn't so sure about, but it probably involved life-support 
failures and reactor overloads and  everyone winding up dead.
     So how about that? With a few day's training, I could be an actual 
crew member on an actual interplanetary ship. My official rank was 
logged as "Spaceman Recruit," though my pay was an officer's--actually 
a bit more than      I'd made as a cobbler.
     "Captain?" said the voice of Jenna Davenroy over the intercom. She 
was crammed into the tiny engine room with Rapisardi, keeping the 
engines healthy.
     This seemed to involve keeping their uranium fuel at the proper 
temperature by regulating the flow of coolant through the three 
ladderdown reactors.
     The job seemed to frustrate them both.
     "Go ahead, engine room," Wallich said.
     "Captain, I hear an alarm," Davenroy said.
     "Yes? What alarm? What's your status?"
     "Not my alarm," she corrected. "I hear it. Outside the ship, I 
think, in the hangar."
     "Outside? Ah, crap." He chuckled. "Okay, fire drill. Everybody 
out, single file."
     I couldn't tell if he was joking or not, but the others worked 
their harnesses loose and struggled out of their seats, and I followed 
them out as      they left.
     Tug Jinacio alone had no assigned function during flight; his job 
was to wait around for an emergency--real or simulated--to happen, and 
then to spring instantly to proper action. Thus, he was at the main 
hatch before anyone else, working the latches, throwing it open, 
jumping boldly out onto the shipyard floor. The rest of us squeezed 
through behind him, twisting and      ducking around the controls and 
protuberances, of the modified cargo hold.
     Outside, yes, there was an alarm bell going off--BING! BING! BING!
     BING! Not a fire but a bloom alarm. Hard-hatted workers ran here 
and there across the floor, doing who knows what. Security was here, as 
well, the pair of sticks Wallich had reluctantly called in as my 
reports drew larger and larger crowds of gawkers, who proved more and 
more difficult to send away. But the sticks didn't seem to know what to 
do. They stood looking around, waiting for something obvious to happen. 
Like me, they couldn't seem to tell if this was a drill.
     I caught sight of a stranger, a helmetless and visorless man in 
street clothes, doing something up against a far wall. Urinating? No, 
dumping something out of a bottle, some milky liquid that splashed into 
one of the air vents there. Well, that sure didn't look right. 
Pointing, I shouted to    the sticks, but they had seen the man already 
and were hurrying toward him.
     Where had he come from? An ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE door?
     Halfway there, the sticks halted. The man himself was backing 
slowly away from the wall, his attention focused on the air vent, on 
what was happening there. Smoke? Fire? Contamination?
     Bloom.
     I had lived two decades in the Immunity without ever seeing one up 
close. I'd seen them often in VR collage, of course, but how was I to 
know how completely the intervening technology blurred the experience?
     The air vent and the wall it was part of began to boil, their 
substance turning fluid, turning into rainbow-threaded vapors as the 
tiny, tiny mycora disassembled them molecule by molecule. The process 
was slower than I would have expected, like watching a pool of spilled 
syrup ooze out across a table, but the im mediacy, the reality of it 
had frozen me in my tracks. How vivid the colors, how crisp the lines 
and edges! I knew exactly what I was looking at'. class-one threaded 
bloom in early germination phase, about two minutes before fruiting 
began. Some structure already visible in the expanding fog, crystalline 
picks growing like needles from the drydock wall.
     I knew exactly what I was looking at, and yet it looked nothing 
like I would have expected.
     Nothing at all.
     Had the man with the bottle caused this? No, of course not.
     What an absurd thought! Mycora had caused this, deadly spores 
riding the solar wind up from the Mycosystem, kicking around Jovian 
space probably for years before somehow finding their way in here. No 
human intervention  involved, nor even possible. Why else have an 
Immunity at all?
     Clearly, the man was fighting the bloom, as I would be doing if 
I'd had a better idea how to go about it. Tug Jinacio, of course, was 
hindered by no such ignorance. He sprinted for the nearest emergency 
locker, removing his Response helmet and dashing it against the glass, 
reaching for the equipment inside and running a double armload of it 
right up to the edge of the fecund area. The bottle man, apparently 
mesmerized, continued to back away slowly.
     The sticks, God bless them, turned tail and ran for the exit.
     With my crewmates standing mutely around me, I watched Jinacio 
open a   macrophage magnum and heave its powdery contents into the 
heart of the bloom.
     Watched him pick up another and another, repeating the process. 
But the phages seemed not to have any effect; the rainbow mist 
continued its slow expansion. An uncataloged pathogen? Jinacio changed 
tactics, started throwing witch's tits to freeze the area down, but the 
effect was not noticeably better, and I began to really worry, because 
if fruiting bodies were given a chance to form, spores would be blasted 
all over the inside of this hangar, and Galileo would have a problem 
like Galileo had never seen nor dreamt of.
     What happened next I can describe in detail only because my 
zee-spec was recording at the time. My own memory is of screaming and 
jostling and running, nothing more, but of course the clear, steady 
images show that I must have been standing there watching as the bottle 
man stepped up behind Tug Jinacio and pushed him bodily into the bloom. 
Tug's body did not come apart at once into threads and dust, but his 
skin had gone rainbow-crystalline with mycoric frost before he'd even 
hit the floor, and of course he never did rise. Did my recording 
capture the full depth and character of his scream? It was a quiet 
thing, mewling and pathetic with surprise. How can this have happened 
to me? How can this fate be mine?
     This pain, this P/IIN, how can it be mine?
     In my dreams I hear a scream sometimes that is like the one I 
recorded, in the same way that the actual bloom was like the VR 
collages that had supposedly prepared me for it. That Jinacio suffered 
in the twelve seconds of his death goes without saying, but the images 
are not on file. God, I owe him that much, at least.
     Again, I have no memory of the bottle man speaking, but in my 
private records he turns toward us, his expression frantic with morse 
and fear and rage. "They're bombs," he says tightly. "I can't let you 
do this.
     However human it may be, it's monstrous to destroy what you don't 
understand."
     And then, whether through accident or miscalculation or deliberate 
suicide, he steps a little too far to the left, catches the edge of the 
bloom, and dies elaborately. Maybe I should ask other witnesses what 
they remember of these events. Maybe these things simply have no place 
in the mammalian brain, no means of being recognized or stored, or 
maybe I'm just    blessed with a poor memory. I don't really care.
     My recollection rejoins that of the zee-spec as Darren Wallich 
crowds into my view, grabbing me by the shoulders and shoving me up the 
ramp, into the Louis Pasteus open hatch. "... not going to get through 
the t-balance," he was saying, "but if the roof collapses we're over 
and done with. Get aboard! Get aboard! Damn it, I'm not going to tell 
you again!"
     At least the scaffolding was gone, the ship bare and gleaming in 
its peculiar way. I did as I was told, and the hatch was closed behind 
me.
     No windows in Louis Pasteur--have I mentioned that?rebut there 
were camera dots embedded in the hull that could assemble a visual 
image and project it through a zee-spec. Somehow, I was coherent enough 
to manage this task, and so was watching as the exit portal irised open 
in the ceiling above us. Our ladderdown reactors hissed to life. 
Propulsion came online.
     The world shuddered. I even reached up to my console and adjusted 
the memory allocations as our landing feet broke contact with the 
floor.
     She starts--she moves--she seems to feel/The thrill of life along 
her keel.
     After that it was the clanging of shiplocks, the roar of engines, 
the press of acceleration as we fled the interior of Ganymede for the 
safety  of the cold and dark outside.
     "I hope the sticks got out I said in an even tone, to no one in 
particular. And after that a lot of us were crying.
     The wisdom of assigning reporters to hazardous space missions may 
be a subject for debate, but I'll point out that I was the first to 
know what was      going on, once we'd made orbit and had a chance to 
get communications set up.
     About an hour, I'd say, though it may have been less.
     A quick tour of the Galileo daily records, still unfolding as I 
perused them, revealed that our bloom had in fact been the second of 
four that occurred within the space of an hour. All were now under 
control in a Final Alert freezedown, with two pathogens identified and 
cataloged for future Immune response. Cleanup crews were sterilizing 
the areas, and repairs were expected to commence within forty-eight 
hours. Considering the seriousness of  the event, casualties had been 
light--only twelve fatalities thus far--but material damage estimates 
had already exceeded two million g.u., enough to    feed the entire 
Immunity for a week.
     Even more disturbing was the news on a lot of the talk channels: 
"... if it isn't the Temples i'll kiss the bloom with my own two lips.
     ··" "... spokeswoman denies involvement. My asd I read 
unauthorized access by Temples members in the vicinities of all four 
events..."
     "... police raids on a pair of Temples laboratories have already 
taken place.
     Authorities can 'neither confirm nor rule out' some form of human 
assistance in the initiation of these blooms. How they could transport 
the spores I have no idea..."
     I thought of the bottle man, and shivered. What kind of bottle had 
it been?
     What kind of contents? Technogenic life was very nearly a 
universal solvent, capable of disassembling almost anything. Our 
knowledge of any given mycorum's inner structure came solely via the 
phages that absorbed and destroyed it, and occasionally from direct 
microscopic assay of the remaining fragments. You couldn't simply pack 
a bunch of live mycora into a bottle and carry them around with you, 
even assuming you could safely collect them.
     There was also a crazy-ass statement from the Temples of 
Transcendent Evolution themselves, echoed to most of the news channels 
on the network: "The events of this afternoon are tragic and 
regrettable. However, no such action has been sanctioned nor shall be 
sanctioned by this organization, which is humanitarian and agnostic in 
nature. It is possible that human beings are partly responsible for 
what has happened, and if the parties involved--if any--are affiliated 
with the Temples in any way, we shall certainly get to the bottom of 
it. We revile malice in any form, and offer our full cooperation with 
any investigation.
     "However, a possible motivation for this attack--if in fact an 
attack has occurred--has become known to us. It concerns the Louis 
Pasteur and its supposed mission of discovery; one or more persons 
claiming a close connection with the endeavor have favored us with an 
anonymous message--detailed and credible within our ability to 
determine--indicating that the 'detectors' to be seeded across sterile 
portions of the inner planets are in fact ladderdown explosive devices 
intended to devastate the surfaces of these worlds.
     "Little is known about the physical and psychical workings of the 
Mycosystem, and such an attack, in addition to its grave moral 
repugnance, could have severe repercussions throughout the solar 
system. It is possible that today's events represent an attempt by 
desperate persons to prevent this tragedy from occurring. If so, we can 
only lament that we were not approached earlier, so that a more clement 
solution to the crisis could be found."
     I flashed summaries of this information to the rest of the crew, 
and could not resist linking my zee-spec to a ship-internal camera dot 
to record and download a brief news channel commentary of my own: 'John 
Strasheim here. Listen, citizens, none of this makes sense, even to 
those of us who were there. Please, let's burn no Temples tonight. ' 
Eventually, Vaclav Lottick got ahold of us, using a full VR conference 
channel in realtime flash. "Pasteur, Lottick here? His face, when it 
appeared before me, was glistening, flushed with rage. "It's the 
goddamn Temples. I knew we should have been suppressing that 
organization, I just knew it.
     Reply!"
     "Pasteur here, go ahead," said Wallich, and suddenly my view of 
him, seated on what was for me the ceiling, was blocked by a mosaic of 
imaged faces: Wallich's own, and mine, and Baucum's, and Tosca Lehne's. 
Another window showed a distorted view of Daven-roy and Rapisardi in 
the tiny, dimly lit engine room. None of us were actually looking at 
the cameras, so our images scattered around Lottick's own in a messy 
jumble that seemed interested in everything but him.
     As it turned out, Lottick's information sources were even better 
than mine. You'd kind of hope so, wouldn't you? What he said was, 
"We've got two very bad mycora on the loose. Blooms are controlled in 
Galileo, but the same pathogens are starting to crop up in the Five 
Cities. Immune system primed for them, but goddamn are they tough to 
fight off. Early analysis shows they contain the entire genomes of a 
number of our latest macrophages, and a whole lot of other crap 
besides. We know how they're doing it, at least: it's goddamn human 
intervention. The splice marks are plain as a letter of confession!"
     "Come again?" Wallich said, though of course he must have heard 
perfectly well.
     "Somebody;" Lottick snarled, "has been modifying and breeding 
these things right under our noses. Somebody, yeah. It's the Temples.
     What about those goddamn 'probe packages' they launch into the 
Mycosystem two, three times a year? What about those? Are they sending 
their best results back down to the source? This is bad, Wallich, this 
is very bad. Don't you dare land that ship."
     "Why not?" asked Baucum, sounding at that moment about as 
flustered as I felt.
     Lottick's face darkened further. "Why not? I thought we understood 
each other. One, Louis Pasteur was almost certainly the target of these 
attacks.
     Or one of the targets, anyway. Set her down and you're just 
stupidly asking to be a threat to yourselves and others. Not on my 
say-so, you're not.
     Two, somebody is directing the evolution of these mycora. We've 
been treating severe cold adaptation and other upper-system threats as 
extreme long shots, but wouldn't you say the odds suddenly look a lot 
better? We've made a huge investment in that ship, and right now I'd 
say it's safer inside the damn Mycosystem than it is here at home."
     "We don't have any food aboard," Wallich pointed out. Outraged, 
Lottick made a face. "Well, boo-hoo, Wallich. Some of us down here 
don't have functioning bodies anymore. You've got a pap synthesizer and 
a water tank, and you took fuel and cargo three days ago, and as far as 
I'm concerned that means you're fully operational. I want those goddamn 
detectors in place and online as soon as goddamn possible, before we 
wake up one morning two meters deep in goo.
     That's your mission. Have I made myself clear?"
     "Yes, perfectly," Wallich shot back. "But I still say we're 
undersupplied.
     I don't think we even have enough oxygen, unless we want to ladder 
it out of our fuel supply. There is no margin aboard this ship, and I 
won't fly her like this."
     "So fine. So get supplies from the goddamn Gladholders for all I 
care.
     You are not to set that ship down, and I doubt you're particularly 
safe even in orbit. Whatever you do, do without excessive delay. Look 
around you, Wallich; we may be too late already."
     "Understood," Wallich said thoughtfully, his grin creeping back 
into place. "But you're right, we could pass through the Floral 
asteroids on our way down. That's probably a fairly workable idea."
     And so that fateful voyage was born three weeks premature, amid 
pain and terror and an almost lethal lack of planning. And rather a lot 
of unfinished business, yes. Small mercy, but at least I'd never told 
Momma about the plant I'd been meaning to buy her; she and I would, as 
per her prediction, never see each other again.
     SPEED In a gravitational sense, the G/adho/d is far, far below 
us, so much so that it would take three years to fall that far, 
assuming we hulled out the heliocentric velocity we started with, 
namely Jupiter's. But canceling that orbital velocity would ladder a 
mere gram of uranium, even counting the energy required to escape 
Jupiter in the first place. What's planned here is somewhat more 
intense: burning half our fuel supply all in a shot, fnging Louis 
Pasteur sunward on a "beeline" trajectory that intercepts the Floral 
asteroids in just twenty-three days--a new all-time man speed record. 
and then, God willing, burning the other half to stop us when we get 
there.
     Our inner-system schedule is similarly compressed: Earth on day 
43, as opposed to 151 in the original flight plan. llas, we'll be 
payingfor this performance in our final burn, which will take over 
seven months to return us to the Immunity../1 kilogram of uranium seems 
like a lot when you just want to power a city, but down there it's like 
feeding the family on a single tangerine.

     from Rrrrrrrrrrocket Ride © 2106 by John Strasheim

     Things were still in a state of disarray, nobody really sure what 
was aboard and what wasn't, who did and did not know of our departure, 
when Davenroy lit the engines up. Life was a messy conference call, a 
crowding' of fear-stinking bodies, a hunt for checklists and air 
filters and Velcro strips to hold things down when the weightlessness 
returned. Thrust surprisingly heavy, about twice the gravity we'd all 
got used to at Galileo, and there I was, hanging from my seat straps, 
feeling the blood pool lightly in my head.
     The worst of it was that my allocation duties were quickly done 
with, and everyone else seemed to have a job to do. So it was that I 
pulled up an external window and a navigation graphic, had time to 
correlate the two, and made the announcement: "Our orbit takes us right 
past the starship. I mean, rightpast it."
     "Departure conic," Darren Wallich said distractedly, his eyes on 
instruments I couldn't see. "'Orbit' usually means you're not still 
under thrust."
     "Not by my dictionary," I fired back, unaccountably annoyed at the 
contradiction.
     "Possibly. But learn the language while you're here, right?"
     "Anyway," I continued, "our departure conic looks like it'll 
bring us very close, like within a couple of kilometers. It should be 
coming over the     horizon right about now."
     "Coming over the//mb," Wallich corrected. And chuckled. Oh, this 
was going to be a fun voyage.
     But now everyone started stabbing at the air, pulling up 
exterior-view windows to see what I was talking about. Here is what 
these windows showed: a circular opening in space, a hole not only 
through the ship's hull but through chairs, instrument panels, and 
people--a hole looking out at focus infinity, no matter what was in the 
way. Not so hard on the eye, really, but it takes getting used to, 
especially the way it tracks head but not eye movements. Turn to look 
at someone, and suddenly there are stars showing  through where a face 
or a heart should be.
     Or in this case, the limb of Ganymede showing through, with the 
stars unwinking above it. In one direction, the stripy beige face of 
Jupiter staring down, not nearly as big or imposing at this distance as 
you'd think.
     In the other, a scattering of smaller moons, faint crescents in 
the light of a too-distant sun. Below, the gray, cratered, 
raked-looking surface of home, lifeless and cold, the ice just one more 
hard, rocky mineral in its crust.
     And there, coming over the horizon right beside Renata Baucum's 
head, a tiny but unmistakable gleam of metal. The starship.
     "Not much to look at," Tosca Lehne observed.
     True enough--what I saw was a long, skinny barbell, mirror-bright 
and all but featureless. But smaller gleams surrounded it, crew pods 
and construction boats strung on just-visible lanyards like insects 
caught in a web, and these provided some sense of scale as we 
approached. Big, very--just over a kilometer long and about a fifth 
that wide at the flared ends. The end pieces themselves would probably 
have fit in the main cavern at Philusburg, but you'd have to slice the 
central shaft into ten or twelve .......... in over flattened buildings 
before you'd even get close to fitting the whole structure in.
     Surface details gradually became visible as the ship's image 
swelled: hatches and umbilical sockets and painted signs too tiny to 
make out. But still the overall impression was of smoothness, 
featurelessness, as with an old-style aircraft or submarine. It didn't 
particularly look years away from completion, but I supposed that 
smooth metal skin could well have been hollow inside, not so much a 
ship as a ship's empty jacket.
     "Captain Wallich," I said, after making sure I was recording a 
good image both of him and of the approaching structure, "since I lack 
the vocabulary, would you like to say a few words about this for our 
viewers back home?"
     "A few words?" He seemed fazed for a moment, but then chuckled and 
loosened slightly. "That's right, we have an audience on board, don't 
we.
     Well, ladies and gentlemen, that object out there is your 
starship. One of these days a name will stick to it, probably when its 
mission is better defined, but for now 'starship' will do. Maybe We'll 
just end up calling it that, ha ha."
     "For those of us less familiar with the project, Captain," I 
prodded, "what are those flared structures at the ends?"
     He nodded, still a bit nervous and annoyed. One of my crew has 
died today, berichter. Push too hard and you'll wind up very unhappy. 
"Uh, yes.
     The aft planchet is the propulsion focus. If you look, you'll see 
it's curved sort of like a flashlight mirror, only what it's reflecting 
are gamma rays. The forward one is the cabin shield, so the crew and 
cargo don't fry.
     You can't see it from here, but there's a smaller planchet forward 
of the cabin as well, for debris and cosmic rays. Going that fast, a 
speck of dust is like a bomb."
     "And what's the crew size expected to be?"
     "Good question, friend."
     "Not everyone, though. Not the whole Immunity."
     He sighed. "Not unless we liquefy them, no. Crew module's about 
the size of an apartment building, cargo spaces included. How many do 
you think it will hold?"
     His chuckle was on the humorless side.
     "So what, exactly, is the purpose of the vehicle. I pressed. "If 
it's not going to carry us all away, as many people seem to believe, 
then what's it intended to carry?"
     "Spores," Wallich said curtly. "Our spores, for a new Immunity. If 
we ever need to run away, we need a safe place to run to, right? Before 
the Mycosystem catches up with us? But there absolutely will be human 
crew and    colonists aboard, people who are alive and working in the 
Immunity right now.
     I'm not aware of the number or nature of the slots, but I imagine 
anyone will have the right to try out for one."
     "Thank you, sir," I said. With a little cut and paste, that 
sequence would collage nicely. Would Lottick object to my breaking 
party line on the starship issue? Did it matter? If my judgment was 
what he wanted, my judgment was what he would get. Not like he could do 
much about it at this point, anyway. The starship flashed by, huge for 
a few moments, its closest range only a few times greater than its 
length, and moving past at over five kilometers a second. And then it 
was behind us, shrinking away like a warning shot over the limb of 
Ganymede.
     From that point on, things began to happen more slowly. Ganymede 
itself began to dwindle, now beneath us, now behind, now a world, an 
object, a bauble. But this took hours, and the bridge crew's 
conversation and task loading dwindled right along with it. On the 
orbital schematic, our apoapsis, the high point of our projected orbit, 
shot away from the little moon, out into Jovian space, our departure 
conic no longer an ellipse but an open, curve, a hyperbola that would 
not bring us back to our starting point.
     But no, as I zoomed the image back I saw the path did not swing 
out to infinity at all, but curved back on itself in an arc many 
thousands of times larger. Still an ellipse, this time around Jupiter 
itself, and the new apoapsis continued to climb, if languidly.
     A faint gray line on the display marked the limit of influence, 
the point at which (a dictionary check informed me) the distant sun's 
gravity would exceed that of Jupiter. And then what? An open curve 
leading away from Jupiter, swinging down into an enormous, sun-centered 
ellipse? There must be more to it than that; somehow, (' we had to get 
all the way down to the inner planets, some billion kilometers distant. 
Measured against Ganymede and Jupiter and the rest of the Immunity, our 
velocity steadily increased, but the heliocentric counter showed us 
slowing down with respect to the sun.
     Failing inward, canceling out the centrifugal pull that held us 
away? That made a kind of sense to me, but I resolved to find out more. 
For the foreseeable future, these geometries would be running my life.
     It would take an hour for the apoapsis to climb out of Jovian 
space, and another sixty before Louh Pasteur did so herself. Like the 
old cartoon, the hungry-looking donkey following behind a carrot it 
could never catch, a carrot dangling from a stick tied to its own head. 
The faster we went, the farther away the carrot retreated. Anyway, 
seeing that there was time--an awful infinity of it, in fact--I cleared 
my throat and broke the silence.
     "Captain, it looks like we're through here for the time being. If 
you don't mind, I'd like to go aft and have a word with Rapisardi."
     "Hmm?" Wallich turned to look at me, his laughing eyes standing 
out against a distant, troubled expression. "Rapisardi? Yes?
     What about?"
     "My job," I said. "We're off on entirely the wrong foot here, and 
I need to know some things before I can start to put a report 
together."
     A giggle formed and died in Wallich's throat, though his 
expression barely flickered. "A report. Yes, well. We'll be doing a lot 
of maintenance drills, you know, especially in light of what's 
happened, and I'll expect you  to pull your own mass. We'll teach you 
to tear down that console and put it back together again, at the very 
least. But we can start all that tomorrow.
     Yes, you can go aft and talk to Rapisardi."
     "Thanks," I told him, reaching for my harness release and 
disengaging it carefully. Under the two-tenths gee thrust, I turned and 
lowered myself until I found footing on the step behind Baucum's chair. 
I'd done this several times in Ganymedean gravity without mishap, and 
though Baucum swiveled her head to glare nervously as I climbed down, I 
managed the operation without stepping or falling on her.
     "Don't thank me," WaLlich said mildly when he saw I was safely 
down.
     "We've all got our jobs to do. Only one thing, Strasheim: run your 
material past me before you transmit. I wouldn't want to see anything 
...
     inflammatory come down looking like official word.
     You see the potential for problems, I'm sure."
     And then he laughed.
     So that was how it was going to be, eh? The walls seemed to close 
in a little more tightly, but I smiled back at him pleasantly enough. 
"Sure I do.
     Yeah, sure I do."
     Sure I did. Renata Baucum turned toward me again, flashing a look 
I couldn't interpret. Emphasis: wide, rolling eyes, the eyebrows 
arching.
     Whatever the message, I wasn't getting it, and her manner 
suggested she'd drop the expression the moment Wallich looked her way.
     Oh, the hell with it, I thought, and turned to go. If it was 
important, she could jolly well tell me later.
     "Mr. Rapisardi, Ms. Davenroy," I said as I entered the engine 
room. Or entered its hatchway, more properly--the room, dim and gray 
and lined with humming pipes, wasn't big enough for three. Wasn't even 
big enough for the    two that were in it, really.
     "Mr. Strasheim," they chorused in reply, and we all shared an 
uncomfortable, unhappy little laugh.
     "Tug Jinacio," I said after a pause. "I don't understand why he 
died. I was hoping one or both of you could answer some questions."
     Davenroy frowned. "About what?"
     "Ladderdown," I said, and the two of them relaxed a bit. "This 
talk of bombs, it's very puzzling. Is such a thing really possible?"
     Rapisardi nodded. "Yes. You know, it's an interesting accusation, 
because we don't normally think of ladderdown in this way. A source of 
energy and raw materials, yes, but also it can be made to explode. We 
don't do this, of course, but whoever planted the rumor must have known 
a little physics."
     "You say 'planted'?" I led.
     "Well, yes. These detectors, which I designed myself, are not 
explosive.
     I would know this, you agree?"
     "Presumably."
     "So the rumor is maybe to disrupt our voyage. There are those who 
disapprove, as well you know, and they are not always the ones you 
expect.
     We're spending a lot of money, and this upsets people, as the 
spending of money will do."
     "I thought we'd kind of got beyond money," Davenroy mumbled with 
more than a touch of sarcasm.
     "Yes, of course," Rapisardi agreed in the same tone, his eyes 
flicking from me to Davenroy and back. "Now that we are dependent on 
heavy metals rather than fossil organics and sunlight, economics have 
simply gone away.
     You want a lesson in economics from a biophysicist's point of 
view? It works  like ecology--it breeds and selects. Not that we 
actually carry them in our     pockets, but the gram of uranium has 
become our most basic unit of currency.
     Thanks to chronic short-staffing, we consider it equivalent to 
half an hour of human labor, though its energy potential is some 
twenty-six million times greater. Aside from ourselves, it is the first 
driver of our economy, the reasons for which are not at all arbitrary."
     "For energy reasons," I said.
     He winced slightly, shifted position in his chair. "Energy? Well, 
yes and no.
     Energy is less important than transmutation potential. In rough 
terms, a fusion reactor cascading a gram of deuterium/tritium up into a 
gram of iron--the basin of the binding energy curve--will liberate 
enough energy to boil about twenty thousand tons of water. A gram of 
uranium in a ladderdown reactor produces approximately the same. And 
yet, the uranium is worth ten thousand times more, because in laddering 
it down, we don't have to sink all the way to iron. We can stop 
anywhere along the way, and our waste products are isotopes of hydrogen 
which we can cascade back up, again stopping wherever we like below 
that magic number, iron fifty-six. A ladderdown economy sees value not 
only in what a substance is, but also in what it can     become, and 
uranium, alone among the stable elements, can become anything."
     That was an interesting prdcis, a perspective I'd never quite 
heard before, but meaning what? I shook my head. "What does this have 
to do with today? I'm not following."
     "No?" Rapisardi banged the wall with his fist, producing a flat, 
solid thump. "Heavy metals. Particularly with its t-balance jacketing, 
this vehicle is very literally made of money."
     "The starship has almost universal support," I pointed out, "and 
it's much bigger and more expensive. No one has started any blooms over 
that."
     "Not yet, no, but maybe someday. At the moment, it's mostly coming 
together out of iron, an essentially valueless material. But even now 
the labor costs are punishing, and heaven help us when we start to fuel 
it. The endeavor may kick us forcibly from a uranium economy to an 
antimatter one."
     "Again," I sighed, "I'm afraid you've lost me. Try to imagine I'm 
not viewing life through a biophysicist's eyes. Or an economist's."
     He shook his head. "You can view through mine, if you like. 
Forgive me; I'm used to having this conversation over and over again 
with the same people.
     Eventually it becomes its own shorthand. What I'm suggesting 
is'that every g.u. we spend outside the Immunity is a g.u. that has to 
be earned back through human labor. And where are we supposed to find 
that? Many people are surprised to learn that lead's energy potential 
is only twenty-five percent less than uranium's, but the thing to 
remember is that lead has ten fewer transmutation targets--eighty-one 
versus ninety-one--which translates into a factor of a thousand 
reduction in its value. Gold, three rungs lower still, is worth about a 
five-thousandth as much as uranium. It has beautiful mechanical and 
electrical properties, but really, the major cost of paving    the 
streets with it is the labor.
     "Louis Pasteu?s engines burn up about 10 g.u. per hour at full 
thrust, but we, the crew, cost more than that even when the engines 1. 
	Fact-checking reveals the costs of 10m of roadway to be approximately 
130 g.u. pure gold, I g.u. assorted dopants and impurities, and 3
     g.u.
     equipment amortization. Human labor and supervision account for 
approximately 24 g.u., or about 15 percent of the total. However, 
Rapisardi's central point remains a valid one.
     aren't firing, which will be most of the time. We can't ask 
things to happen by themselves; vision is transmuted to physicality 
through our hands, only.
     "And believe me, that starship will make its costs apparent soon 
enough. The energy density of antihydrogen is about 250 times what we 
can achieve with ladderdown, and the production and storage are 
difficult.
     Wonderful fuel, the best, but the last time I checked, a gram of 
it cost over eighty thousand g.u., which basically means the ship is 
not going anywhere this decade, nor probably the next. But we will 
continue to pay, you see? There is bound to be impatience, and 
backlash."
     I still wasn't satisfied; Rapisardi was answering the question he 
wanted to answer, which wasn't really the one I had asked. I pressed 
for clarification: "You're saying you don't think the Temples of 
Transcendent Evolution had anything to do with the attack?"
     "Eh?" He looked up from his gray, almost blank-looking console, 
looked straight at me for what seemed the first time. Suddenly 
realizing, no doubt, that he was speaking for the record, that the next 
words he spoke would cling to him, remain associated with him for a 
time in the public zeitgeist.
     His face went cautious. "No, I wouldn't go so far as to say that. 
The problem I'm discussing is systemic throughout the Immunity, but the 
Temples have their own private complaints as well. Twice as many 
motives as anyone else.
     By the crudest possible logic, I'd say there's a sixty-six percent
chance they were involved in the incident in some way. Neither outcome
would surprise me very much, let me say that. Is this an interview,
Strasheim?"
     "If you like," I said with some reluctance. "It doesn't seem like 
the best time. Really, I just wanted clarification on the bomb 
question."
     He nodded, thinking about that. "You need something to tell the 
people back home, I see. I didn't knowJinacio all that well, but I 
liked him. His loss--well, naturally it's very upsetting. Maybe you 
could mention that, as well."
     Was that resentment I heard? Probably, yes. The price of reporting 
for a living, I supposed, of being seen as one who reports. In a way, I 
actually was a spy. I noticed Davenroy, sitting quietly in her little 
niche, looking at me. She had known Jinacio rather better than the rest 
of us.
     Possibly I was intruding on her grief? How not to intrude, in this 
tiny vessel?
     Facts of life, problems I'd better start solving here and now.
     "I'll do that," I said to both of them, now looking past them at 
their instrument niches, crowded together like the dark spaces under 
opposite desks. "I liked him, too; some people are just better at 
inspiring confidence. Um, ungraceful change of subject: I'm curious 
about how the engines are performing. Not for the home audience, but 
for my own peace of    mind."
     "All nominal," Davenroy said, amicably enough, "but I hope you 
like microgravity. First burn should end in about forty-eight hours, 
and after that we're weightless. If you're going to barf all over 
everything, dear, you should think about staying in your quarters."
     My coffin, she meant. My eggshell-thin plastic tomb. "I'll be 
fine," I    assured her, "but thanks for the warning. I'll, uh, I'll be 
on the bridge.
     See you later."
     "Undoubtedly," Davenroy said, and as I turned away, I thought in 
the shadows of her face I maybe saw the glimmer of a teardrop, or 
possibly a  wink.

     EIGHT
     SNAPSHOTS

     The Evacuation of Earth was much like that
of the Titanic a century and a half before; we see the same bravado, 
denial, lifeboats floating away half empty, and only in about the final 
quarter of the crisis do its participants really begin to voice and act 
on their peril. In Earth's case, this euates to a span of maybe 
thirty-six hours. Not a long time to clear a whole planet.
     Within a hundred kilometers ora major spaceport, you had just 
about a one in a thousand chance of making it to orbit alive; outside 
these areas the  odds dropped to less than one in a million.
     and from there, another five percent failed to make it to Luna 
before their air or water or luck ran out. Those that made it, of 
course, completely swamped the Lunar bases' ability to cope, so 
mortality continued in a steady grind for weeks and months afterward. 
The state of emergency never ended, and no sense of normalcy was ever 
established, which turned out to be a fortunate thing when the spores 
started falling and the bare, sterile Lunar soil itself began to bloom. 
In a very real sense, the Second Evacuation was a mere appendix to the 
First, the continued unfolding of a single event.
     For a number of reasons, from the astrodynamic to the mycoric to 
the geopolitical to plain coincidence, evacuees from Earth's tropical 
regions ended up mostly at Mendeleev and Moscoviense on the Lunar 
farside. With notable exceptions, those unfortunates starting out 
between thirty and forty-five degrees north or south latitudes didn't 
make it out at all, while those from the high temperate zones found 
themselves at Tycho and Clavius   and Pingre in the nearside's southern 
latitudes.
     These groupings were largely preserved in the Second Evacuation, 
in that the farsiders--actually the first to leave in many 
cases--settled primarily in the asteroid belt, while near-side 
refugees, fearing the spread of a Mycosystem whose limitations were by 
no means clear at that time, pressed straight on to Jupiter. The wide 
Bode gap separating these two regions proved a formidable barrier to 
sustained commerce, which in turn limited contact to the time-lagged 
data channels, permitting the regions' cultural evolution to diverge 
significantly. Within a decade, the Immune/Gladholder distinction had 
taken firm hold, and indeed has changed little since that time.
     Less to survive on out here, yes, but more to compete with down 
there.
     Who can say which life is harder? and to those who express 
surprise that the Gladholders have hung on as long as they have, let me 
assure you: they say exactly the same about us.

     from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure, © 2101 by John 
Strasheim

     Image: Engine room, starboard instrument niche; close-up, main 
oversight console. Text Enhance: The panel is nearly featureless, just 
a flat  Teflon grid marked offinto domino sectors by little white 
lines. Made active  and useful mainly by the zee-spec--see technical 
specification for further    detail. Schematic Enhance: 0.75-second 
overlay of the console projections.
     //PDX..' Adjust resolution and color palette to favor little 
yellow lines!
     Also, just for yucks, show human figure as wireframe around 
cartoon skeleton.
     Image: Restore previous.
     Voiceover: The disquiet of knowing the engines can in fact explode 
is mitigated somewhat by the knowledge that Davenroy sits here most of 
the time, monitoring reactor status whether the engines are firing or 
not. In an environment like this, you learn very quickly to trust your 
crewmates.
     Smile for the camera, dear. Perfect, perfect. They love you 
already.
     Image: Close-up, contamination and environmental monitoring 
station.
     Voiceover: Sudhir Rapisardi backs Davenroy up with constant 
assessments of the fuel supply and engine surfaces, watching not only 
for TGL infestation but for invaders as mundane as sterile 
interplanetary dust, and for such homegrown dangers as cracking or hot 
spots in the materials. So, how's it going?

     Rapisardi: OK.

     Voiceover: A man of few words, ladies and gentlemen, but if you do 
get him talking you'd better have some time on your hands.
     Image: Engine room. Pan (i.e., float) back two meters; zoom out 
to max viewing angle, focus infinity. Text Enhance: Engine room crew 
work overlapping 15-hour shifts, and either station can be reconfigured 
to perform some or all of the functions of the other. See technical 
specification for further detail.
     Schematic Enhance: I pt. grid overlay, calcium white, 10 cm 
spacing, conformal with inanimate surfaces. Hold one second, fade one 
second./IPDX:    Human figures should eclipse grid lines. Fix in post!
     Voiceover: What you see now is the view of the engine room from 
the wardroom hatchway, which shows you most of what there is to see, 
but which is  also a little misleading visually. It's difficult to 
convey how dim and cramped this space really is, but my bedroom closet 
back home has more light and more maneuvering room, and probably yours 
does, too. Rapisardi and Davenroy are like little troglodytes back here 
in their cave. Turning around...
     Image: Yaw 180 degrees; medium zoom, focus three meters./IPDX: Too 
washy. Adjust color palette for greater ambient light.
     Text Enhance: The fanfold doors are of stiffened carbon mesh, 
anchored at two corners and able to slide in tracks at the other two. 
Surfaces colored, thank God, by a double layer of spray enamel. The 
latching mechanism (not visible) includes the ability to lock quarters 
from inside, but any fool could pop the door open if need arose. The 
blue door is of course the rest room, or "head."
     Green is the shower, and all others are crew quarters. The lack of 
red anywhere reflects a merchant spacer prejudice which equates that 
color with     danger, but you do get to missing it pretty quickly.
     Voiceover:... We see the wardroom. Large enough to hold the entire 
crew, but only in null gravity. We've had two meetings here already, 
and it's an amusing sight. Gives you a stiff neck, too, looking around 
to see everyone.
     Captain Wallich is adamant about "face time," though--important 
for morale and all that. Over on this end is the galley, with our 
beloved pap synthesizer.
     Image: Galley, medium magnification; pap synthesizer at window 
center.
     Schematic Enhance: Wireframe rendering of toilet behind blue door, 
with plumbing leading to reclamation unit and thence to pap 
synthesizer.
     Hold one second. Image: Restore previous. Image: Close-up on pap 
synthesizer, angle selected to emphasize familiar, kitchen-appliance 
look. IPDX: Adjust palette.
     Voiceover: What can I say about nutrient pap? Utterly healthful 
and not quite tasteless, it's oatmeal's idiot cousin. Since we have no 
actual food aboard, we're building a fine, close relationship with this 
machine. Yum. I can't share the odor with you, alas, but Davenroy says 
it's mostly in my mind anyway. Or maybe she's just burned out her smell 
receptors leaning over those hot reactors all day.
     Image: Pan back, pitch down 45 degrees. Rotate until green door is 
centered.
     Voiceover: This is the shower, currently in use by our bioanalyst, 
Re-nata Baucum. [Knock on the doorframe.J How's it going in there?
     Baucum: Damn it, Strasheim, if that door comes open I'll 
[expletive deleted].
     Get away from me.
     Voiceover: Already we're just like a family, I swear. Wallich will 
make me clean out the garbage disposal again if I keep this up! 
Actually, privacy is very important on a vessel this small, which is 
why I can't show you the crew quarters. We all need a place that's 
truly and uniquely ours, right?
     The tragic death of Tug Jinacio has left us with an extra berth, 
though, and we've started leaving the door open, treating the space 
like a kind of annex to the wardroom, named in his honor. The Jinacio 
Ballroom, yeah.
     Image: Jinacio's berth. Image: Coffin. Image: Bunk bed. Image: 
Restore previous. IPDX: Adjust palette for lighting again. Mummy bag 
should be puke     green, not gray--what is wrong with this hue filter?
     Voiceover: As you can see, it's a bit tight and public for 
one-on-one   conversation, but in the absence of anything better it 
serves well enough.
     This way, we can keep out of each other's berths entirely, which 
definitely seems to be a good thing; null gravity has a way of making 
the spaces bigger, but knees and elbows and especially voices shrink it 
right back down again.
     There is a temptation to use the berth for extra storage--even 
with our hurried departure, there's an awful lot of clutter and damn 
little room for     it--but thus far we've resisted. Hooray for us.
     Image: Pan back 2 meters, yaw 90 degrees left, roll 45 degrees 
right.
     Right through the hatchway, pause and freeze. Image: Bridge; four 
chairs, two occupied. Image Overlay: Roving circular window, exterior 
view as per AFDS!
     (star field only, no enhancement). Text Enhance: Bridge 
workstations are less plastic in function; many more of the controls 
are built-in and cannot be altered, since software glitches could 
otherwise present a threat during critical operations. The one 
exception is the captain's station at center right, which has built-up, 
touch-sensitive 3DI screens that can assume  the form and function of 
any other bridge station, and some engine room functions as well. See 
technical specification for details.
     Voiceover: Meet Tosca Lehne, our Immune system overseer, and of 
course    Captain Wallich.
     Wallich [grinning]: Ha. Hallo there. Funny he should get to me 
last, eh?
     Welcome to the bridge.
     .4PDX' More photogenic than I've been thinking. Look at him 
playing to the camera here! Work a bit more screen time for him in the 
future.
     Well ... Hmm.
     Entertainment/information balance problem; what's my real 
responsibility here? Definite food for thought.

     Image: Close-up, Darren Wallich. Center that smile.

     Voiceover: And how is everything going, sir? Any problems?
     Wallich: Boredom and the threat of vacuum, ha ha. Nothing we can't 
handle.
     We're on a more or less sunward course right now, and should 
intercept the Floral asteroids in ten days. So far, the ship's 
performance has been  nominal, meaning "good," but then we haven't been 
asking very much of it.
     Which I suppose is also good. Air quality is at the top of my 
agenda right now; we've got six people eating nutrient pap in this can, 
and life support could probably do a better job of removing spare 
intestinal gas from the atmosphere. We'll tear the system down later 
and have a look at the percolation filters. Pretty exciting, right?

     Image: Restore previous.

     Voiceover: And Lehne, how are things with you?

     Lehne: Fine.

     Voiceover: The ship's Immune system behaving normally? No 
problems, no    interesting observations?
     Lehne: Nobody in here but us, Strasheim. Immune system masses 
about a milligram, all told, and isn't doing anything except sit there. 
Less than   dust.
     Voiceoven Well, that's the way we like it, I guess.
     Image: Restore previous. $chematicEnhance: Show instrument panel 
projections, course ahead as two parallel dotted lines, curving 
slightly and converging in the distance, R^Gv. (aU, MKa) TO G^ĄMEDE 
odometer ticking slowing upward, R^gE (^u, MKa) TO SU odometer ticking 
slowly down. Show sun icon to Wallich's right--circle 0.2 degrees wide, 
with yellow "rays" covering eight degrees in just-visible 
scintillation.
     Voiceover: And there you have it. Short tour, yes, I know, but try 
living here. This is John Strasheim, Mycosystem Mission One 
correspondent aboard the Immune Ship Louis Pasteur, signing off for 
now. Good night, and sleep well.
     from Louis Pasteur, a "Walking" Tour 

     NINE
     SHIPTIME


"Now turn the screw until it reaches full extension," Wallich was
telling me.
     "Like that, yeah, perfect. Easy as shoes, right? Ha ha."
     "Right," I agreed as the screw came loose from its slot, though 
not, of course, from the metal panel cover itself. Wouldn't that be a 
wonder: a bridge full of loose, floating screws, and us all chasing 
after them? I repeated the operation five times, and in under a minute 
I had the cover offin my hands, like an empty box of strange design, 
missing a few walls and sporting holes in awkward places. It was made 
of silver, I think, though probably it was an alloy of some sort.
     Never a hint of tarnish.
     Moving carefully, I pocketed my screwdriver, then set the cover in 
the bright orange safety of my chair and wrapped the restraint harness 
loosely around it to keep it from floating free. Where it had been, the 
guts of my instrument panel now hung out, gray and green and 
glittering, looking exactly as the insides of electronic devices had 
looked for decades untold.
     This by itself is significant, if you think about it: there had 
been no quantum leaps, had been in fact a regression of these 
technologies since the Evacuation, owing probably to a general mistrust 
of things too small to be seen. Blue-light microscopes were the 
instruments of choice in our bit shops back home, and even I knew about 
the strict lower limit that imposed on component size. Whatever gets us 
through our lives, I guess.
     "Now we're going to remove the memory boards," Wallich advised, 
"which will give us access to the main logic unit, or MLU, which we're 
also going to pull. Theoretically, we should have spares for all these 
parts, but of course those were never loaded, and I seriously doubt the 
Gladholders will have anything compatible, ha ha, but just the same 
we're going to clean and inspect every piece. I'm not above soldering a 
wire here or there to bypass a bad chip, so we may practice that as 
well."
     "Lucky us," I said, activating and focusing the tiny work lamps on 
my zee-spec.
     Wallich, drifting somewhere close behind me, laughed. "That's 
funny. That's really funny."
     "I think your sense of humor needs adjustment."
     But he just laughed at that one, too, so I went ahead and started 
pulling memory boards. They were about the size of debit cards, though 
a good deal stiffer and more fragile. I was careful, and my leg 
pockets soon bulged with them. I should mention, by the way, that I was 
upside down to my workstation (i.e., right-side-up to everyone else's), 
with my feet braced on the sides of the chair and my knees around its 
stem.
     Not the most comfortable position, but secure enough for this sort 
of delicate work. If you've operated much in null gravity, you'll know 
what I mean.
     The work went slowly, but eventually I had uncovered the MLU, and 
was studying the clips and brackets that held it in place. One false 
move right now could doom this mission for good, but then, if dust or 
other assorted schmutz got inside here--or mycora, God forbid--or if 
there were some sort of fire or short circuit or 
name-your-favorite-accident, then not knowing my way around in here 
could doom us just as surely. Personally, my money was on leaving it 
the hell alone and taking our chances, but the decision, of course, was 
Wallich's, and he'd shown a strong propensity for making us dismantle 
things, clean things, inspect things to death and beyond. "You'll 
always have hardware anomalies out here," he'd said to me several times 
these past few days, "but you never know what they're likely to be, and 
if you're going to be prepared for unknown problems, you have to know 
the ship." Well, maybe, but I suspected it was also a way to keep 
everyone occupied and out of each other's hair.
     "Here and here," Wallich said to me now, leaning past me and 
pointing with his own screwdriver. "You're going to press these tabs 
with your thumbs, and just rock the unit gently with your fingers. It 
should pop right out."
     I put my thumbs on the aforementioned tabs and pressed gently.
     "Like this?"
     "Uh-huh. Maybe a little harder. Now use your fingers, rock it back 
and forth. Yeah."
     The unit popped right out. I held it up, studied it: a rectangular 
prism of clear plastic, full of voids and mazey channels run through 
with gold wiring and black, insectile chips the size of fingernails. 
Inside, in the heart of it, threads of light winked on and off, a tiny 
mesh of blue and red flickers locked away inside the plastic. Not 
something I could fix if it actually broke, but I could easily see how 
dirt could get inside, and spraying the whole thing down with solvent 
and air jets and then wiping it    clean was certainly well within my 
powers.
     I was about to do just this when something caught my eye, 
something yellow and spidery in the space behind where the MLU had fit.
     Wallich had flashed me a tutorial on the resource allocation 
oversight console and made me review it three times, so in a wireframe 
schematic sense I had a fairly good idea what guts went where. This 
bean-sized object, though, did not correspond to anything I remembered.
     "Hallo," I said, "what's this?"
     Wallich drifted in closer. "Hmm?"
     "This here, this yellow thing with all the wires coming out. Is 
that part of the network feed?"
     "No," Wallich said, "it sure isn't. I don't know what that thing 
is.
     Here, move away for a minute."
     I disengaged from my chair and let Wallich settle in where I had 
been. He traced and poked at the air for a moment, and his zeespec's 
work lamps came on. He leaned in for a closer look.
     "Damn," he said, "I don't know what that thing is at all. It 
doesn't show on the schematic. If somebody's retrofitted around a 
design error, I sure as hell never heard about it. Jesus."
     He pulled an instrument from his breast pocket, waved it at the 
yellow thing, and frowned. "There's a small processor in there, doing I 
don't know what. No independent power source, no sign of volatiles or 
toxins, minimal EM emissions... It's not a bomb, not a transmitter, 
not apparently any sort of sensor. This isn't funny.
     Where the fuck does this thing connect?"
     He began tracing the wires out with his finger, clucking and 
muttering to himself.
     "Could it be some sort of monitoring device?" I asked.
     Wallich let out a quick sigh of impatience and minimal amusement. 
"Some sort of monitoring device. I think that would be a safe bet, yes. 
You're a genius, Strasheim. Look at this. Look: it taps into the 
diagnostic feed right  here, and telemetry over here, and this one 
looks like it might head straight around to the main transmitter. Jesus 
Christ."
     "So what does it do?"
     "I don't know. I don't know. I have an idea, though; have you got 
any   messages waiting to go out?"
     · I had twenty-three of them, five of which exceeded the 
six-terabyte buffer limit and were thus broken down still further. 
Busywork or no, I'd found a lot more free time here on Louis Pasteur 
than I'd ever had back home--hours and hours of it in great, 
uninterrupted blocks. All I had to do was close the door of my cabin, 
finger up the news and talk channels, wait out the round-trip light 
delay, and read the day's concerns all in a shot.
     Then, a bit more circuitously, I'd roam Immunity records and 
library sites and my own zee-spec's internal references, shake the data 
around for a while, and produce blocks of refined information. And when 
all that was done, I often found I still had an hour or three before my 
sleep shift in which to  juggle the information into patterns of useful 
insight. Not just for one or two stories, you understand, but for all 
of them. For the first time in my life, I felt completely in touch with 
the society that created and supported me, from a vantage point fully 
eighty million kilometers away and receding   rapidly.
     This irony was the subject of a whole editorial by itself.
     Not that I was shirking my duties as mission correspondent. In 
fact, I sometimes worried I was overreporting the details of life 
within Louis PasteuFs confined spaces, but even so, the fullest of days 
didn't get more than about ten minutes' total coverage, meaning maybe 
an hour ofpostproduction on the day's sights and sounds.
     And then there was mail, the volume of which was rapidly getting 
out of hand. One of my outgoing messages was a form response to a 
hundred and nine separate viewers!
     "I have messages I haven't queued yet," I said to Wallich. "Sew 
eral of them. Why, what have you got in mind?" "Send one of them out."
     "Don't you want to 'review' it?" "No. Send one out now, please."
     His tone let me know this was an order, not a suggestion, and 
anyway my comment had not been very fair; his censorial input had so 
far been negligible, really just a glance here and there and some 
nudges to edit around the profanity.
     "Yes, sir," I said without sarcasm, and traced the appropriate 
icons on my zee, feeding refined message data into the transmit queue.
     "God oamn. Wallich said right away. "God damn! Activity in that 
processor jumped a factor of a million for a moment there, and it 
definitely sent something offinto the transmitter. Lehne!"
     There was a pause, Wallich fingering at the unseen.
     "Lehne! Wake up and report to the bridge! Baucum, you too."
     Another pause.
     "Because I'm telling you to, that's why," Wallich said. He turned 
back to me. "I think this thing just piggybacked a signal on your 
outgoing message. Deeply encrypted--I couldn't detect anything in the 
bitstream--but     I'll bet my next year's pay that's what happened."
     Baucum appeared in the hatchway, Tosca Lehne hovering behind her. 
You know the look of people who've been woken from a sound sleep with 
bad news? That's how they looked, though both were fully dressed.
     "We've been bugged," Wallich told them both. He pointed at the 
yellow spider.
     "In here. I want a full diagnostic on this thing before we cut it 
out, and I want every panel on this ship removed, and every circuit 
checked for tampering. Whoever put this thing in here did not have your 
best interests at heart."
     That comment seemed to strike him as funny, and he couldn't quite 
keep from chuckling.
     Well, so much for free time. I'm embarrassed to admit that my 
first thoughts were not for the safety of the ship and crew, but for 
the audience back home: I'd recorded Wallich's statement, and the entry 
of Lehne and Baucum just before it, and now I leaned close for a good 
shot at the spider itself, thinking, This will sure generate some mail! 
And oh, how right I  was.
     In a way, it would have been better if we'd found another bug or 
two.
     As it was, we tore apart every piece of that ship and found 
nothing suspicious. As for my little spider, it turned out to be 
exactly what Wallich had surmised: a device which studied the contents 
of central processing, compressed and encrypted a summary, and melded 
it almost seamlessly with any outgoing transmissions. The more we 
talked with the folks back home, the more information we leaked about 
our position, our trajectory, our resource allocations and other 
plans...
     Who would want such information? The Temples of Transcendent 
Evolution were obviously a prime suspect, though what use they could 
make of it was far from clear, and Rapisardi's insistence that we had 
other enemies was a telling point, and one echoed firmly by Wallich. 
And how could the Temples put together so sophisticated a device, and 
interface it so cleanly and invisibly with Louis Pasteu pounds data 
processing systems? Anyone with that kind of access could just sneak 
code into the system for a purely software solution, yes? Well, 
apparently not; we searched there as well, for nearly a full day, and 
turned up nothing at all. Needless to say, this lack of conclusion was 
about as satisfying as a mouthful of plastic foam.
     Too, since departure we had used our transmitter rather a lot. I 
was not the only one "working" in two places at once; Davenroy was 
collaborating with colleagues on some sort of technical paper, while 
Lehne and Rapisardi and Baucum made frequent correspondence, requests 
for reference material, et cetera. And Wallich, well, he was a system 
unto himself. It didn't seem to bother him, supervising his research 
teams back home even as he was leading our investigations here aboard 
the ship, and time-lagged or no, Vaclav Lottick certainly made his 
presence felt. My respect for Wallich went up several notches as I 
watched him tackle a couple of serious Immune system issues and 
organize a presentation to Lottick on same, while dismantling,   
combing through, and reassembling the innards of his own bridge 
workstation.
     And why, I ask myself now, was my respect for him not higher in 
the first place? Why do we do that, project averageness onto so many of 
the people we meet? Even people whose accomplishments are clearly 
beyond the  ordinary?
     Caveman baggage, I'm sure, but some days you have to wonder how 
many cavemen got their heads bashed in for it.
     Wallich's talent for divided attention did not manifest in the 
rest of the crew, alas. Staring blankly, speaking and gesturing into 
the empty air became familiar symptoms, a lunacy all our own. Not 
unknown among spaceship crews, I learned, but here was an unusual 
concentration of talents, for the most part torn from very full 
professional and intellectual lives that refused to sever cleanly. 
Twice I stumbledmliterally--across Renata Baucum's form drifting 
through the wardroom like an epileptic husk, her attention drawn off 
into la-la land in midtransit.
     "Watch it," I told her the second time as I disentangled my arms 
from her waist. "I don't know what you're working on, but I wish you'd 
go do it in your quarters. You're a navigational hazard."
     Behind the palm-sized lenses of the zee-spec, her eyes focused on 
me  momentarily. "That little yellow thing took up a lot less space 
than you."
     Her tone was acerbic.
     I nodded curtly. "Thank you, I'll put that in tonight's 
broadcast." Oh yeah, we were friends all right. It didn't help that I'd 
cupped her breast in  my hands at some point in our slow collision. It 
didn't help that'her long hair came undone and floated past my nose, 
smelling of apple-scented soap.
     It didn't help that her expression barely flickered, barely 
reacted to me at all, or that she took my advice, retreating to her 
berth and closing the door in my face.
     She didn't even have the decency to slam it.

     TEN
     GAMES OF LIFE      'adlocation looks fine," I said, studying my

instruments for any datum to disprove the statement. This was a minor
course correction, a mere thirty-second burn of the engines, but the 
way Wallich ran us through our   paces, you'd think we were 
crash-landing on the surface of the sun.
     "Immune system nominal, no activity," Tosca Lehne's voice joined 
in.
     "Nay solution confirmed," Baucum said. "Not that I know squat 
about it."
     "Reactor performance looks to be plus point-four-eight sigma," 
said Davenroy, her image crowded up next to Rapisardi's in a little 
corner window of my zee-spec. "Map that to engine performance, though, 
and the confidence factor is only point-six, because the dispersion on 
a cold engine is a lot higher than one that's been fired recently.
     Plus or minus a second and a half in burn time, let's call it."
     "Acknowledged," said Wallich. "Contamination?"
     Rapisardi's image shook its head. "None, sir. You are go for 
burn."
     "Well goody. I love this part."
     Grinning, Wallich worked his panel for a moment, gave the order, 
and then the engines were humming and I went from weightless to hanging 
upside down in my seat. Not serious acceleration by any means, but 
after more than a week of weightlessness, I would have preferred it in 
the other direction.
     My face, puffy with fluid already, puffed further. My feet 
tingled.
     Wallich watched his numbers. "Ten seconds, good, fifteen. Right
down the groove. Twenty... and.., twenty-five.., and... that's all."
     Weightlessness returned. "Beautiful, beautiful. I'd say we should 
do this more often, but keep hitting them like that and we won't need 
to."
     He chuckled.
     "So, Captain," I said, turning fully toward him and zooming in 
slightly on his face, "Floral asteroids tomorrow?" "And Gladholders, 
you bet.
     Real food!" He chuckled again.
     "Strasheim, will you bloody cut it out?" The voice was Baucum's. I 
turned.
     "Hmm?"
     "Fish in a tank," she said. "This constant observation, it's 
enough to drive a person insane. And the way you edit this stuff; you 
strip away all the context, particularly your own questions, and make 
it look like there's this giant conversation going on all the time. But 
it's your conversation, not ours, and I'm bloody sick of it."
     I stopped recording, watched her for a few moments. "What 
conversation should we be having?"
     She snorted, shook her head a little. "Wrong question, friend. You 
should be asking, 'Who is the primary beneficiary of these reports?'" 
"And the answer is?"
     Her shrug was elaborate and slow, with an expression to match. "I 
don't know.
     Your personal agenda dictates what slice of reality the audience 
is exposed to. I keep asking myself why you're here, but that question 
never seems to occur to you. That's all I have to say."
     Darren Wallich's laugh seemed to startle her. We both turned, saw 
him looking back at us with a fatherly expression, amusement and 
annoyance and a tinge of genuine warning. "All right, you two," he 
said. "Fun's over.
     Strasheim, I want you to interview this woman for not less than 
thirty minutes, camera off, mind open. Baucum, whatever bug is up your 
ass, I want you to dig it out and show it to our mission correspondent 
here. Believe it or not, we really do have business to conduct, and 
this spurious feuding is not only bad for morale, but potentially 
hazardous. Are we clear on this?
     Baucum? We can't afford the distraction."
     She frowned, pressed her teeth together for a moment. "Yeah.
     Fine.
     "Strasheim?"
     "It's perfectly all right with me," I said, shrugging. "I've been 
wanting to know her better anyway." Um ... Seeing Baucum's expression, 
I knew  right away it was the wrong thing to say. My chagrin was 
short-lived, though--every damn thing I said around her was somehow the 
wrong thing, and if she wanted to get worked up about it, well, that 
was pretty much her own problem. I stared her down.
     "Meet me in the ballroom in ten minutes, all right? Time enough to 
get your thoughts together."
     And with that, I unstrapped myself, kicked off from my chair, and 
sailed between her and Wallich to the exit hatch. Jinacio's quarters 
were a pretty confined, nose-to-nose sort of space, and I thought maybe 
I should brush my teeth first.
     "Let's get this over with," she said, pulling partway into the 
berth and then wedging herself in the doorway. The body language here 
was interesting: I was fully inside, trapped, as it were, while she was 
free to leave at any time.
     Too, she was putting distance between us, and explicitly denying 
that the door would be closed. There is no need for privacy, friend, 
but you will hear me out before you leave. But for all that, she was 
still in the room with me, close enough that I could feel the heat of 
her body, smell her breath mingling with mine in the air between us.
     Oddly, she had brushed her teeth as well.
     "So, what are we here to discuss?" I asked, offering her a 
handshake,   which she accepted with some reluctance.
     "I don't know. I haven't decided."
     "No? You've accused me of dictating an agenda. What agenda, 
exactly?
     What is it you think I'm misleading people about?"
     She frowned, suddenly vague and uncertain. She waved a hand. "It 
isn't you, exactly. You're more of a symptom. It's just that everyone 
seems so sure about everything; about the mission, about the 
Mycosystem, about the Immunity itself. It's like there's this mass 
consensus, that the only possible solutions are the exact ones we're 
currently focused on. Placing these detectors is so important be cause 
every supposition we've made is right, and every alternative viewpoint 
is wrong."
     Her spacer-blue eyes met mine, and for once they were more 
sympathetic than hostile. "You're so party line in your outlook, and 
you don't even see that in yourself, because you're totally immersed. I 
don't know how to explain it to you, but I've studied technogenic 
lebenforms my whole adult life, and there's a lot more going on there 
than people are willing to admit.
     People come up against a barrier of willful ignorance, and they 
just stop. No, we can't try this. No, we can't think about that. No, 
no, no, we simply don't have the wherewithal. But we throw together an 
elaborate mission like this on twelve months' notice. Doesn't that 
strike you as odd?"
     "I don't know," I said honestly. "Well, it does me."
     She stopped then, looking at me, not seeming to have anything else 
to say.
     Well, olay, but Wallich had ordered me to drag this out for a full 
half hour.
     And anyway, Baucum was still blocking my exit.
     "You say there's more going on in TGL," I tried, "than people are 
aware of.
     What exactly do you mean by that?"
     She smiled wanly. "That's extremely difficult to articulate. 
Subtleties you can't appreciate, not because you're stupid but because 
you lack the background to make sense of them. Even within my own 
community, within the circles that study TGL 
with--supposedly--mathematical rigor, certain observations are just 
swept under the rug because they don't fit our preconceptions." "Humans 
on Earth?"
     I asked.
     She looked startled. "Where did you hear about that?"
     I smiled. "I have an ear for rumors. That's one that never quite 
seems to die."
     "Well, that wasn't quite what I was thinking of, but yes, it's a 
fine example. Are there humans still living in the Mycosystem? Ask 
anyone and they'll tell you no, of course not, the mycora would have 
eaten them decades ago. But study the sensor data, and suddenly you're 
not so sure.
     Structures that might be villages, heat sources that might be 
fires or mammalian metabolisms grouped together. It's all so far away, 
we can never be  sure what we're seeing. Maybe the Mycosystem generates 
these structures itself; it's not nearly so homogenous or random as 
people seem to think. You know the term 'emergent behavior'? Small 
actions repeated a million times over, with decidedly macroscopic 
results. Our bodies aren't lumps of undifferentiated flesh, and the 
Mycosystem is not a lump of undifferentiated mycora. Are there human 
beings in it? I don't know. But I've never found a colleague willing 
even to discuss it."
     I scratched my chin, cleared my throat, thought about what she was 
saying.
     Cameras off, mind open. Humans in the Mycosystem, more than just a 
silly rumor? Maybe. Maybe. The thought was unsettling. But Baucum's 
tone was beginning to bother me as well; too much like the Temples' 
propaganda, more     anger than true scientific indifference. How open 
was her mind?
     "Okay," I said, "that was my example. What was yours going to be?"
     "The Game of Life," she replied, then hesitated. Not trusting?
     Not sure of my ability to comprehend?
     "Hmm?"
     "Hmm. Well. Are you familiar with the concept of a cellular 
automaton?"
     "Like a spreadsheet," I said, nodding. "I hear the terminology 
sometimes on the network, in all sorts of contexts. It's a tool, a kind 
of geometric language, like if you could somehow speak in two 
dimensions.'' She relaxed visibly. "Or three, yes. Each cell of the 
spreadsheet oo holds an equation whose inputs are the outputs of 
neighboring cells.
     The game of Othello is a simple example--black, white, or empty; 
place one piece, change one value, and all the others change. But while 
Othello and Go and your typical financial or analytical spreadsheet 
will stop right there, in the general sense that first wave of changes 
will drive a second wave, and that will drive a third and fourth, and 
so on. So you have the potential for self-perpetuating event systems."
     "Okay," I said, slowly wrapping my head around that concept. It 
seemed clear enough, though I'd missed the connection to TGL, the 
Mycosystem, or anything else we'd been talking about.
     "Okay," she agreed. "Now imagine a spreadsheet, or a Go board, 
where each cell can contain only two possible answers: on or off. No 
colors; either there's a stone in that space, or there isn't. Now 
imagine that the rule is, a cell will be turned on if three of its 
immediate neighbors are currently on, and it'll be turned off if fewer 
than two or more than three of its neighbors are on."
     I thought about that. "Um, okay."
     She shrugged. "Well, that's it. That's the whole thing. Imagine 
that 'on' means 'alive' and 'off' means 'dead,' and you have the Game 
of Life.
     Conway's twentieth-century mathematical curiosity, but it's still 
in use today. For obvious reasons."
     "Obvious?"
     In lieu of reply, she flashed me an animation window, a black 
background seething and boiling with patterns of white dots. 
Instinctively, I  recoiled, but of course the image moved with me, 
suspended in the air an arm's reach away.
     "Very pretty," I said, fixing the image in three-space, pinning it 
a  few centimeters off the bulkhead. "This is it?"
     "Yup."
     Presently, the roiling died down, the dots on the screen settling 
lol into a pattern of fixed ovals and flickering crosses. It didn't 
take much watching to see that this was a ground state of some sort, a 
permanent condition from which the game could not escape. But off on 
the left side of the window was a thin black stripe set with icons. A 
control panel? I touched one of the symbols, and a new random pattern 
of dots appeared and resumed that awful convecting motion.
     God, it really did look like a TGL bloom. Again, though, the 
motions died away into tiny repeating structures. "Interesting," I 
said. She nodded.
     "How faithful a model is it, though?"
     "Not very," she admitted. "That particular sim is pretty flexible, 
though.
     You can play with the parameters, archive patterns with 
interesting behavior... It looks enough like the real thing to be 
worthy of study, in the same way that our forebears used ink drops and 
water tanks for the simplified study of atmospheres. Serious study, I 
mean, with peer review and all that.
     Experimentation by analogy can draw us off in peculiar dead ends, 
so it pays to be vigilant; I've personally fooled dozens of TGL experts 
with inorganic chemical solutions. They think they're seeing a 
primitive alga or mycorum at work, instead of sucrate of lime, or 
silicate of soda .... The carbonates tend to form closed cells, while 
sulfates and phosphates produce large tubular structures. Either way, 
though, you get not only the forms of life but close simulacra of the 
functional microstructure.
     Really, these solutions form bodies that grow, interact, 
reproduce, and wither, to the point you'd just swear they were alive. 
But it's just blank chemistry, the emergent behavior of closed or 
oscillating reaction loops involving extremely simple molecules. 
Self-organization without metabolism, like crystal growth. Like 
patterns in the frost.
     "Of course, if you pursue the inorganic angle far enough, you get 
to the clay problem, which tends to lead people in the opposite 
direction. In clay you have these tiny particles, these silicate fines 
easily as small as     an amino acid or RNA nucleotide, and they have 
some particular qualities.
     Density, dielectric constant, capacitance ·.. Static electricity 
plays a tremendous role at these scales, so you get interactions, and 
eventually you get chains of particles with, I guess you'd say, 
mutually compatible properties. You get two- and three-dimensional 
complexes as well, but their     behavior is less interesting.
     The point is that one-dimensional chains will serve as templates 
for their own replication. Eventually, you get a highly ordered clay 
composed of     repeating submicroscopic features."
     I felt a chill. "Living mud?"
     Smiling, she shook her head. "Oh, no. On this end you've got 
self-organization and replication at the molecular level, but the 
emergent behavior is gone. The chains perpetuate themselves, but they 
don't actuy do anything. Well, maybe they served as the original 
templates for life, organic matter clinging to the particles and forced 
to chain up in the same ways. But amino and nucleic acids will 
polymerize spontaneously, so Occam's razor eliminates the clay as a 
necessary step. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of things out 
there that look like life but aren't really.
     "TGL is the real thing; it eats, sorts, metabolizes, reproduces.
     Doesn't die, per se, without prompting, but then a lot of organic 
life is technically immortal as well. Death is a tool of evolution, you 
see, but when evolution can take place within the living organism, it 
becomes a nonissue.
     And think of the emergent characteristics of bacterial mats: not 
much going on there. In terms of its interactions, TGL is more akin to 
reefs and    anthills.
     "As for cellular automaton models, I think they cry out for more 
attention than Immunity circles generally give them. Metaphor is a true 
and righteous way to approach understanding, damn it, and when you're 
too timid to examine your subjects firsthand ..." She looked at me 
skeptically.
     "To you, I probably sound like a fanatic."
     I shrugged. "We all have our issues. I've listened to whacko, with 
ideas like this, but they don't talk the way you do." I nodded sideways 
at the Game of Life window, which of course she couldn't see. "Whackos 
don't perform controlled experiments."
     "You surprise me," she said, still studying my face as if trying 
to find me somewhere behind it.
     "Likewise. Is examining the Mycosystem firsthand your reason for 
coming on this mission? A personal grudge, a chance to show up your 
timid peers?"
     "It's part of why I agreed to it, yes. As we approach the infested 
regions, Rapisardi and I will be busy with our measurements. This 
mission is all about fear and pride and politics, but if we just open 
our eyes, there's a lot of science to be done while we're at it. Maybe 
not world-shattering in and of itself, but the Immunity is in desperate 
need of a wake-up call."
     Wake-up call. I mulled the term over in my mind. Archaic: a 
telephone signal from one person to another. Time to get moving, 
friend. Had alarm clocks supplanted the practice? No, surely alarm 
clocks had existed for hundreds of years, much longer than telephones. 
So it must have been the personal contact that mattered, the exchange 
of human voices. As with my own job.
     I had been bracing against the sides of Jinacio's cabin, my back 
on one gray-white padded wall and my feet on the other, but now I 
moved, aligned myself with Baucum's body once more, so that I hung 
before her in the doorway, close enough to touch.
     "I'm no tool of the state," I told her mildly. "Whatever you may 
think, your theories and findings are of as much interest to me as any 
other aspect of this mission. Unusual perspectives are a great help in 
communication, especially of complex ideas."
     Her face tightened. "So I'm useful, then. How flattering." "Hey," 
I said, frowning at her tone, "be nice. If you want to reduce it to 
those terms, I can't stop you, but understand that I can't use you 
without your using me right back. Equal and opposite reaction, or 
something like that.
     You want a voice for your ideas, well, I'm it, so quit spitting in 
my face.
     It works a lot better if we're friends."
     She let go of the door frame and drifted back a bit, her face a 
cipher, unreadable. "You want a friend, Strasheim? Fine, I'm your 
friend. The Game of Life is my gift to you. Play around with it, let me 
know what you think, and we'll talk about it sometime over a nice cup 
of tea. Let's see ...
     Tomorrow I'm visiting with Glad-holders, and the day after that is 
thrust ops again.
     Are you free on Thursday?"
     I tried to return her inscrutable look, to match the gruff 
neutrality offer tone. "Yeah, whatever. It's a date."
     She kicked away and was gone.
     I checked my system clock, down in the corner of my vision: 
fifteen-thirteen.
     Baucum and I had missed our thirty-minute goal by a good forty 
percent. Well, I wouldn't tell Wallich if she didn't.

     eLEVEN
     GLAd HOLDERS

     Our approach into the Floral asteroids
was a cautious thing--thirty-odd hours under power, with constant, 
kicky adjustments to the thrust vector.
     Whang whang! Interplanetary space was very empty down here, even 
in the thick of the so-called asteroid belt, but moving at hundreds of 
kilometers per second, you'd better believe we worried about hitting 
something. Wallich  assured me that a chip of rock the size of a 
fingernail clipping could reduce us all to component atoms. I believed 
him, but the fact that we were as often as not steering toward such 
objects, employing our deceleration thrust against them, was not a 
source of confidence. "What better defense than a hot, hot stream of 
engine plasma?"
     Hmm.
     Our destination, a midsized asteroid named Saint Helier 
(pronounced "heel-yehr"), swelled to fist size from nothing in the 
space of a couple of hours, but as we continued to slow, it took the 
whole rest of the day to fill up 170 degrees of sky. We were expected, 
of course; a weeks-long sleet of communications had preceded our 
approach, and continued now as we applied for an orbit license and 
docking permit, and received final instructions on where and how to 
complete the tryst.
     Not that this exchange was any picnic; while officially a dialect 
of English, the Gladholder language is really a kind of mystery loaf, 
baked from a planet's worth of linguistic leftovers. In plaintext it's 
like a chain of story 'problems and jokeless punchlines in someone 
else's job jargon, and out loud you're lucky to catch every other word 
in the blur.
     Still, in my years of amateur journalism I'd had occasion to peek 
at some Gladholder net channels, and reading and posting to them from 
Louis Pasteur I was able to confirm that Lottick's people had called 
ahead of us, and that some sort of charity had in fact been arranged. 
Which was good, because our only alternative was to turn back for home 
on a much slower, much thriftier    trajectory than the one that had 
brought us here.
     The rock itself was the color of coal, and from the outside gave 
little evidence of habitation. Its night face was covered in black 
rectangles, its dayside splashed with the silver of parabolic mirrors, 
dipping down into natural craters as if pooling there, liquid. And even 
when Saint Helier filled half the sky, blocking out half the stars, we 
hung motionless before it for quite some time, nearly forty-five 
minutes, while Wallich sorted out final details with a disembodied 
voice, with many repetitions and requests for clarification crossing 
the vacuum between them.
     "What? No, six people, and the cargo will not be unloaded. What?
     Repeat, please!"
     His sense of humor kicked in only occasionally, and even then with 
a kind of strained chuckle. Not nervous, exactly, but not really 
thrilled about  this whole undertaking. The bother, the delay, the 
uncertainty... People were dying back home. Would the Gladholders 
really come across for us?
     Intersocietal trade was by no means unheard of, but neither was it 
common.
     The cost involved was just too absurd. And of course someone had 
tried to bloom Louis Pasteur the last time it sat in a dock, so maybe 
he was nervous after all. Maybe all of us were.
     We weren't orbiting Saint Helier, but rather hovering above it, 
mild thrust counteracting its sub-ludicrous gravity, and when final 
docking clearance arrived, it was something of a surprise when a 
shiplock irised open  right below us, barely a hundred meters away, not 
concealed in any way but simply hard to see against the dark surface. 
Not the last such surprise we were to encounter that day.
     Under Wallich's supervision, the ship eased itself slowly down 
into the docking berth. There was a bumping noise, and then the soft, 
solid clang of metal on metal as the mooring latches closed, and the 
boarding tube ground its spiral walls out to the proper dimensions to 
mate our hatches with theirs.
     "Pop the outer latch, please," Wallich said to Rapisardi, who had 
temporarily taken over Tug Jinacio's doorman duties.
     "I copy," Rapisardi replied. "Opening the hatch now."
     And then, suddenly, alarm bells were going off all over the ship.
     "The hull is reacting," Lehne said, his tone more disbelieving 
than afraid.
     Renata Baucum, though, flinched away from her instruments, her 
pinned-back hair bobbing not quite weightlessly. Turning, she shouted: 
"I'm getting replication events in the main airlock! Close it!
     Close' it." "Close ' It.
     Wallich echoed. One hand went to the arm of his chair, gripping 
tightly.
     "Copy! Closing outer hatch! Where is the decon? Did anything get 
inside? My god, where is the decon?"
     "Nothing got inside," Baucum said, a bit more calmly.
     But Tosca Lehne, red-faced and frightened, shook his head.
     "Doesn't matter. Inner hatch isn't t-balanced. No protection. 
Something nasty got in there, it can eat through to the crew 
compartments."
     Wallich grunted, stabbing at the air with his free hand. "Right.
     Getting us out of here. Control, kindly release the mooring 
clamps--we've picked up a bug of some sort. Repeat, release the mooring 
clamps so we can blast clear."
     Pause.
     "What? That's ridiculous. Release the clamps, please."
     Pause.
     Wallich touched his chin, his ear, listening impatiently. 
"Describe the phage, please. Phages, right, whatever. Uh-huh. Surface 
structure?
     Uh-huh. Baucum, is replication in the airlock tapering off?" 
"Yeah," Baucum said, "significantly." Pause. More stabbing and poking.
     Wallich's face appeared in a small window at my zee-spec.
     "Well, Pasteurites, it seems that ruckus was the local Immune 
system equalizing with ours. Some sort of adaptive onboard library 
sniffing out our      phages. I dunno, sounds schidlich to me, but they 
claim it's normal enough.
     So, I'd like a volunteer to please open up that inner hatch."
     "I'm here already," Rapisardi said reluctantly.
     "Would you do the honors, then?"
     "Copy, I'm opening the hatch."
     "You see anything?"
     "No."
     "Baucum? Any suspicious activity?"
     "Its seems to have stopped. Our phages have gone a little twitchy, 
but the only activity is theirs."
     Wallich grinned. "Right, well, as advertised. Care to walk inside, 
Rapisardi?
     Take a breath? I can't order you, but I'm asking nicely. Ha ha."
     Pause. "All right, yes. I'm doing it. I'm in the airlock. It seems 
perfectly normal in here."
     "Okay. We'll give it a few minutes to see if you explode or 
anything, and then we open that outer hatch and go, uh, shopping. Any 
objections?"
     I could think of a few, but then again, three weeks of close 
quarters and nutrient pap were arguing the need for fresh air. I 
suppose we were all thinking that, because despite the nervous, 
precarious feel of things, nobody spoke up. The minutes passed, and 
finally Wallich gave the order, and the hatch was opened. The moment 
was a bit more unnerving than I'd been ready for, but also exciting, 
exhilarating. A chance to get out of this feculent container, yes, but 
more than that: the opening of a gateway to the truly exotic. 
Glad-holders! A hollow asteroid, its gravity barely a tenth of     
Ganymedean normal, a two-hundredth of a gee.
     "Hallo," we could hear Rapisardi saying. "Yes, nice to meet you.
     Yes!"
     A voice mumbled replies, indistinguishable as we threw off our 
safety   harnesses and leaped from our seats.
     "Easy!" Wallich was saying. "Easy, single file, no pushing!" But 
he was laughing and jostling as he said it, as eager as any of us to 
get outside and see. We could simply have opened an exterior window on 
the zee-spec and walked it around to the hatch for an easy view, of 
course, but none of us did, which should tell you something about our 
frazzled state of     mind.
     Davenroy met us in the wardroom, and Renata Baucum, who was in the 
lead, stopped and bowed and motioned for her to precede us--an awkward, 
silly, slidey set of motions in this asteroidal gravity. Davenroy, 
who'd been  busy at her station for forty of the last forty-eight 
hours, brushed past her with only the most minute gesture of 
acknowledgment. And then her attention was all on the walking; the 
downward slope of the ramp was like the incline of a swimming pool, 
impossible to follow without bobbing and floating, toes touching down 
only occasionally, and then in near-frictionless glissando.
     Only by bracing her hands against the protruding cargo hold was 
Davenroy able to complete the operation with any grace at all.
     Baucum followed her out, and then Lehne, and myself, and Wallich. 
The walking was difficult, our Ganymedean shoes entirely unsuited to 
the task.
     The cargo bulkhead was an enormous help, though--something to 
hold, to push against, to follow along. Maybe Gladholders made lower 
ceilings than ours, and walked around spiderlike with all four limbs 
splayed out, clinging simultaneously to wall and ceiling. I couldn't 
help but grin at the image.
     Behind me, I heard Wallich sealing the airlock, heard the beeps 
and squawks that announced the security system's activation.
     Outside the ship was a docking tube, and outside of that was... 
well, a port complex, obviously. Very much like Galileo in some ways, 
except for the junk, and the many little children, and the fact that 
there were plants growing all over everything, gray/blue/green/ black 
vines and stalks and shoots and fat clusters of leaves making mosaics 
of every wall. Yeah, and there was no sense of up. You know that old 
Dutch artist, Maurits Escher?
     The guy with the tesselating shapes and the visual riddles and the 
inside-out architectural drawings that hurt your brain to look at? 
Stairs going nowhere, stuff like that. Hew the walls a little rougher, 
put a jungle and a junkyard and a kindergarten class in it, and that 
would be Saint Helier's spaceport to a decimal point.
     It took a moment to realize that the creatures leaping wall to 
wall were human children, laughing, barefoot, and minimally dressed. 
More interested in movement than dignity, they put all four limbs to 
work in their  clamberings and brachiations, playing Tag or Follow the 
Leader or King of the Top or some such. Humans are primates, oh yes, 
and our long arboreal past bubbles right to the surface in low gravity. 
Unless for some reason we retain a planar environment, and weigh 
ourselves down with heavy, tank-tread shoes...
     Once upon a time, reduced gravity was supposed to make humans a 
taller, thinner, more elfin race. The truth turned out a bit less 
glamorous, as more and more of our children were born with crooked 
spines, curving limbs, clubbed feet... Hypogravitic osteo deformans. 
The man Rapisardi was talking to was a classic example of the syndrome, 
a hunched figure half a head shorter than myself, looking young enough 
either to have been born in Saint Helier or at least to have done most 
of his growing here. Growing twisted, like an old tree. But he was 
handsome in spite of the deformity, and possessed of a sort of 
archetypal grace. The primate thing again, probably.
     And oh, was he ever dark! You get used to thinking of the Immunity 
as a heterogeneous society, diverse, full of everything, but when was 
the last time you saw a young man with skin the color of a good stout 
beer? The body was swathed in patterned, iridescent fabrics of yellow 
and blue. And there was an Asian cast to his eyes, and a grin framing 
straight, yellow-white  teeth.
     Check my image archive sometime; the file is LPASTEUR/ 
aH1DXB0001.
     Nothing compares to that first look, that first shock of 
foreignness. The most striking feature, though, was his toes, which 
were as long and thick and straight as a double row of thumbs. Never a 
shoe on those feet, never a moment's burden. Seeing them then, I felt a 
moment of obscure envy; Earth was nothing to this young man, not a 
memory, not even an architectural legacy.
     "Heyyo," the man said brightly. "Ahn behalf& gavnoffice, aloha 
wekkome teh San Heelyer. Ma nom wa Chris Dibrin, kai I am lok to assist 
you. How you doeng?"
     To his credit, Rapisardi was attempting to reply for us all.
     "We're fine, thank you, and very eager to examine your trade 
goods.
     We have no food!"
     The man--Dibrin?--smiled and nodded. "Yeh, yeh, tre been, amigos.
     Canno comprend a sinnle word. German ye parolas? En-glesh, ah ah.
     Permeht ye I take libert? Abm, excuse." He pointed at Rapidsardi's 
zee-spec, with body language indicating he found it both interesting 
and funny, a kind of technological clown hat. "Big lens. Inface, 
program, inout, yes? Er. May I meddle?"
     Rapisardi, hesitant, looked to Darren Wallich.
     "Well, hey there, partner!" Wallich said in a phony accent native 
to neither the Immunity nor the Gladhold. He reached for a 
long-fingered hand, shook it vigorously. "You want to meddle with this 
man's zee-spec. In what manner, exactly? And why? For the purpose of 
translation?"
     "Translation," Dibrin echoed, striving admirably to match 
Wallich's inflection. Oh, the harm we do in jest!
     And then, suddenly, my zee was going nuts on me--varicolored 
characters and ideographic icons filling up the whole of my view, 
scrolling down from top to bottom and then starting again at the top, 
new text overwriting the old in three-dimensional nonsense palimpsest. 
Dizzying, really, and in this gravity that was no small thinglose your 
feet and you could be quite some time regaining them. But then, all at 
once, my view went black, then white, and then cleared altogether.
     "Gomen, neh?" Dibrin said, his smile now looking a bit sheepish. 
"Wa any mas bien?"
     And on my zee-spec, right below Dibrin's face, appeared the 
plaintext: "I'm sorry, eh? Is this any better?"
     A soft exhalation went up from all of us. This man, this 
bare-eyed, specless, twenty-year-old boy, had probed our operating 
systems, tailored a translation program to run on them, flashed it to 
us through security overrides, and configured our task managers to run 
the thing in realtime without any explicit activation commands on our 
part. Like magic, this highly  invasive procedure, like finding your 
house suddenly full of someone else's furniture.
     And he'd done it in seconds, with barely a twitch of his hands.
     "Ouch!" Rapisardi cried, in alarm rather than actual pain. "Hey! 
What and how? No, you may not meddle!"
     "I'm sorry," Dibrin said, still sheepish. Well, the zee-spec said 
it in response to his jabbering. "I thought it would save time, but 
that was probably very rude of me. Like touching, yes? You people don't 
like to touch."
     "What?" Wallich said, off balance for once.
     "I'm sorry," Dibrin repeated, his eyes going shifty, his face 
taking on an expression of genuine worry. "Making a mess of this, I 
told them I wasn't the one to talk. Look, Governor's office sent me 
down here to escort you Munies around, make sure you didn't walk out an 
airlock or anything. But I'm technical, see? Literally technical, like, 
full of technology. Wires.
     You don't do that either, and I told them, hey, look, I'm going to 
fucking freak those guys out. And it happened. See how good I am at 
predicting?"
     Well.
     We stood there gawking. What else to do? Low gravity, Escher walls 
covered with vines and dark, chattering children, and this alien man 
talking right into our eyeballs whether we liked it or not.
     Full of wires? Neural direct was one of many technologies spawned 
in Earth's final decades, now very much out of favor. Or so I'd 
thought! And that programming trick, so far beyond human capacity; the 
product, surely, of artificial intelligence, another idea left behind 
on the blooming carcass of Earth. There was only the question of how 
the deed was done: communication via some faux telepathy, radio or IR 
or something? Or were they inside him, sterile nuggets of machine 
thought glittering in the chaos of his organic brain? Neither 
possibility was especially comforting.
     "What's your customs procedure here?" Wallich wanted to know. "I 
was expecting to dock with some sort of quarantine facility."
     Dibrin frowned, tapped his ear. "Customs? You mean inspection?
     It's handled.
     Passive sensors, scouting microscopia, like that. Shouldn't 
trouble your ship's systems any, though do let us know, er, if any 
problems should arise.
     Been nine years since a Munie ship ever came to Saint Helier, so 
maybe you never know."
     "Munie?" I asked, intrigued by the term. I'd come across it once 
or twice in sifting Gladholder net traffic, but never in clear enough 
context to  realize its meaning: Us, the peculiar inhabitants of the 
upper system.
     Now Dibrin looked embarrassed. "Apologies, sir, and meaning no 
disrespect."
     I grunted, half-amused. "It's a derogatory term, then?"
     He smiled at me, or maybe grimaced. I could see yellow around the 
whites of his eyes, threaded delicately with blue and red. An 
unpleasant, vaguely fishy smell came off his breath. A human smell, I 
should say.
     "Derogatory, no. Munies, four-eyes, duckfeet, the people upstairs 
...
     It's just something to say. Why, what do you call us?"
     "Gladholders."
     He grunted, amused. "No imagination, eh? Seek, maybe we should 
just head straight for the market."
     Wallich nodded. "I think that might be best, yeah. Are we 
walking?"
     "Floating?" Baucum corrected.
     Dibrin nodded. "It isn't far. If you'll follow me?"
     He braced his feet and shoved off for an opening high on one wall.
     We followed, awkward not so much from gravity--for weeks we'd been 
bouncing from zero to point-two gee and all levels between--as from the 
geometry of the space. Like playing a new sport for the first time, 
before you've quite gotten a feel for the ranges, the angles, the 
available traction. I, for one, fell short of the opening and had to 
leap again. Would have felt bad about it, too, except that Wallich did 
exactly the same thing.
     The opening proved to be the mouth of a trapezoidal tunnel, wider 
at the bottom than on the top, and once we'd assembled there, Dibrin 
propelled himself down its length with a pair of lazy but decisive 
kicks, like something a swimmer would do. No mystery where he'd gotten 
those strong toes!
     We "Munies" tried to replicate the feat with limited success. The 
idea was clear enough: launch into a flat parabolic arc that would 
bring you to   touchdown far ahead, without first intersecting any 
solid surface.
     Head against the ceiling, it took about four seconds to fall 
feet-to-the-floor, maybe twice as long as it would have been on 
Ganymede, and many, many times what Earth would have to say about it. 
I'd have thought it'd be even slower than that, based on our extremely 
minimal body weight on Saint Helier, but nature never seems to care 
what I think. Anyway, these long, straight leaps proved no easy feat, 
especially in gold-weighted shoes.
     As I collided softly with the walls, it was difficult not to 
notice that here, as in the docking bay, they were covered with 
creeping vines. Up close, though, I could see what was hanging from 
them, and it proved to be a sort of smooth and tough-looking fruit, 
ovoid in shape and somewhat smaller     than a human head. I dug back 
into old Earth memories. Coconut?
     Breadfruit?
     Cantaloupe? I wasn't sure any of those grew on vines. I fingered 
up my    notetaker, jotted down a reminder to ask about it sometime.
     Right now, though, Dibrin had got back to talking business. 
"You've got a thousand-dollar line of credit," he was saying, "and 
Governor has instructed me to haggle on your behalf. Food and clothing, 
right? I know you need oxygen and uranium as well, but those are 
supplied by the port authority at standard rates. A kilogram of 
uranium? Seek, that's a lot. Lucky you get it cheaper down here!"
     "You don't use much ladderdown,' Davenroy said, not asking but 
prompting.
     "Ladderdown, no. For propulsion, for excavation, a few things like 
that, but what are we supposed to do with the waste heat? Small, 
metal-rich planetoids do not provide the heat sink you people are 
accustomed to, and anyway we have the sun blazing at us all the time. 
So we use that."
     "Mirrors the size of Innensburg, right?" Wallich smiled. "We 
didn't get much of a look at the sunward face on our approach, but I 
guess we'll see it on the down and out. Must be quite a sight."
     "We can visit if you like. It'll be tomorrow before that uranium 
is cast in a single mass."
     "Tomorrow?" Wallich's grin faded. "Our mission is fairly urgent, 
sir."
     Dibrin shrugged. "Can't be helped. I can't make it happen any 
faster."
     Wallich's mouth twitched, indecisive for a moment before the grin 
surfaced again. "Well, there's an excuse to spend the night away from 
work."
     "I'm to set up accommodations if you so specify," Dibrin said 
"There are staying homes all along the main concourse."
     Wallich's grin widened. "Well, hey, then. Shore leave, everybody 
What do you say? Ha ha."
     My own mumbles of approval were joined by many others. The 
Immunity's plight was desperate enough, but it wouldn't worsen 
measurably just because we'd stopped here for the night. It smelled 
funny in the Gladhold, like cheese and Freon and potting soil gone 
slightly bad, but by comparison Louis Pasteur was a veritable sewer, 
and going back inside her before she aired out was not a notion that 
appealed. And of course, there was the food thing; flavor issues aside, 
my teeth tingled at the very thought of tearing and grinding and 
chewing again. Enough with the nutrient pap!
     New corridors crossed ours at right angles every thirty meters or 
so, and while there were no other pedestrians moving along with us, 
there were quite a few cutting across our path, all skating along 
barefooted like Chris Dibrin. My glimpses of them were brief, and alas 
I recorded no images, but my memory is of a festival of colors, skin 
and hair and clothing of every imaginable hue. More skin than you'd 
expect to see back home, though modest enough, not so much a flesh 
display as a pajama party. Or gangs of teenagers on their way to one, I 
suppose; yes, the crowd was a young one. Higher birth rates will do 
that to you, I suppose, but I'd begun to feel self-conscious, 
overmature, unnecessarily stiff and hot in my spacer uniform. And far 
from    home.
     The air, I should mention, was a good deal warmer and more humid 
than in the Immunity, or even aboard the Louis Pasteur. It felt a bit 
unclean somehow, and a bit unsafe. Not so much from the added bloom 
danger--though that was certainly a consideration--as from a general 
upper-system wariness of moisture. Even deep inside Ganymede, water ice 
is an important component of the rock, and hot, moist air is a clue 
that the cavern roof is maybe about to fall on your head. It happens. 
Anyway, I knew Saint Helier wasn't going to melt or collapse or 
anything, but I did have the unpleasant sense that I was not in the 
Immunity, that all sorts of nanoscopic crap was bouncing around in my 
lungs and on my skin, phages and microbes and God knew what else, and 
the moisture lent the feeling that all of it would stick. Unclean. I'm 
not sure how else to describe it.
     Not that my attention was really on this, though. It was one more 
detail, one more component of the alienness of this place. Mostly, my 
attention was on trying to walk without falling over, especially when 
Dibrin turned suddenly into the crowd, slipping easily into one of the 
side corridors while inertia carried us Munies into walls and people en 
masse, in a great flailing of limbs.
     Darren Wallich roared and guffawed at this, and the Gladholder 
children took the cue and laughed right back, slapping our backs and 
grabbing our hands as if these skiddings and crashings were the most 
brilliantly amusing bits of cocktail tomfoolery they'd encountered all 
month. Well, maybe that was so. At any rate, by the time we got moving 
again, Dibrin had on a half smirk that he wasn't bothering to hide, and 
moved through this more crowded hallway with an exaggerated care. This 
way, friends. This is how we do it.
     And then, suddenly, with no warning at all, we were at the market.

     TWELVE
     THE FEAR DOLL

     One of the deepest and most enduring mysteries
of the Mycosystem is where, exactly, it came from. New Guinea, yes, 
obviously, but how far had those first few spores traveled before 
grounding in that rich, tropical loam?
     Most doctors reject the "panspermia" hypothesis outright, citing 
the "keyhole problem" as prima facie evidence of terrestrial origin. If 
mycora were truly visitors from another star, whether transported here 
naturally or  otherwise, would their chemistry be so uniquely suited to 
the consumption of  Earthly biomass? Would they have, ready at hand, 
the enzyme analogs to reduce those steaming jungles so quickly and so 
completely?
     That the Mycosystem might be an alien weapon deliberately 
targeting Earth's biomass seems equally improbable; the metabolism of 
the First Mycorum  is thought to have resembled, in various aspects, 
that of recycling and agricultural nanocytes, in vivo microautomata, 
and of course the "prank" self-replicators that were already a major 
social problem in the developed world. So did somebody's mutant 
vandalbug go walkies and take on a life of    its own? lgain, the 
experts deny it.
     "No doubt there were malcontents down there," one nameless doctor 
assured me in a hurried hallway conversation, "who would have destroyed 
the Earth's teeming masses if they could. Without a crack research team 
and a large, expensive laboratory, though, I doubt very much that a 
technogenic organism like that Would have happened. The sophistication 
is well beyond what a lone amateur would accomplish."
     So much for the notion--romantic in its own grim way--of the mad 
scientist and his years-long toil in a musty attic workshop. The truth 
is doubtless much harder and more complex. We have, almost certainly, 
no one but  ourselves to blame.
     I claim no great knowledge in this field, but my own pet 
theory--built wholly of fragments and naive supposition--revolves 
around the so-called "smart liquids" that mathematicians and other 
theorists sometimes employed for massively parallel numerical analyses. 
The easiest way, it seems, to run a trillion simultaneous computations 
was to code them in a broth of replicating, self-modifying 
nanocomputers. Powered by a very specialized  chemical diet, of course, 
but otherwise left to run and mutate unattended...
     When I shared this idea with my anonymous doctor friend, though, 
he simply smiled and shook his head. "No, no, I doubt that very much.
     But it's a nice thought, isn't it?"
     Yeah, nice. That was exactly the word I had in mind.

     From Innensburg and the Fear of Failure © 2101 by John Strasheim

     I don't know quite what I'd been expecting. On Earth, we used to 
get our food and clothing and such from shopping malls. On Ganymede, of 
course, you'd simply flash down a price guide, order remotely, and wait 
twelve to twenty-four hours for delivery, the term "market" referring 
exclusively to    the hypothetical trading and dickering that 
established the quarterly prices.
     But here in the Gladhold, the market was a physical locus of real, 
physical activity, voices and bodies and currencies hurling this way 
and that.
     And still there was no sense of up!
     Well, almost no sense. The market's cavern was fifty meters across 
and by no means dome-shaped or even spherical. Not quite random, 
either, but the     jagged, right-angle contours followed some plan 
that was not apparent to me.
     A chamber, as they say, of high fractal dimension. Imagine the 
inside of a geode. The merchants themselves sat surrounded by their 
wares in flat, steel-mesh baskets the size of ballista cars. The 
baskets did point more or less in the same direction, toward us, which 
meant that we were more or less looking straight down on the display, 
but right there any semblance of order      ended.
     The baskets sat at a hundred different levels and ledges, tilted 
slightly this way, slightly that way, slightly heaven knows what other 
way, and the milling throngs of shoppers, several hundred people at 
least, could be seen leaping and gliding from perch to perch like so 
many birds in a  jungle cage.
     And the noise! A hundred voices chattering and dickering and 
arguing and laughing! The mind boggles at such waste, such 
extravagance. Surely there must be a better way to get goods from 
producer to consumer! On Ganymede, one tended to work and eat and sleep 
and perform routine household maintenance, with shopping being an 
inevitable but oft-postponed inconvenience. How long would we avoid it 
if it had to be like this?
     Surely these people must have better uses for their time!
     Dibrin looked back at us, shrugging eyebrow and chin and shoulder 
together as if to say, "Come on, it's not as bad as it looks, and 
anyway what other plans have you got?" And then he leaped feetfirst 
into the space where the corridor dead-ended and the floor opened out 
into marketplace.
     "Look around for what you need," he said, or rather, the zee-spec 
said he said, as he fell gently into the maelstrom. "Bag it and wait 
for me.
     I'll come around with money in a little while."
     Baucum and Davenroy exchanged uneasy glances. Lehne and Rapisardi 
stood by waiting for someone else to make the first move, while Darren 
Wallich looked down and snorted several times with amusement. I, having 
nothing better to do, jumped down after Dibrin.
     He lighted on a ledge three meters below, and pushed off to one 
side. I copied him, a bit more forcefully, and landed a moment after 
him in a basket      filled with.., dolls?
     The merchant seated there, a flabby woman with wavy brown hair and 
skin the color of walnuts, called out a single word, which the zee-spec 
translated as "Hallo, please buy something!"
     "Just stepping through," Dibrin assured her without looking up. 
But he    grinned and nudged one of the dolls with his foot.
     It screamed. "No! No, I can't, I won't! Get away from me! Get 
away!"
     Catching my expression, Dibrin smiled mischievously and toed the 
doll again.
     "Help! I weep, I tremble. I can't! I can't!"
     "My god," I said. "What is it? What are you doing to it?"
     The woman looked sharply at Dibrin. "Pay for it if you're going to 
play."
     "Sorry," he said to her. And then to me: "It's a phobia. You 
feeling alone or afraid or nervous about something, you kick this thing 
around.
     Confront your fear, crush your fear underfoot. Symbolic. Very 
popular."
     "It's horrible," I told him. "What if you're a sadistic bastard? 
What if you just like to kick things around, make things scream?"
     "Different doll," he said, shrugging, and leaped away for another 
basket.
     Well.
     I couldn't help myself--I bent for a closer look at one of the 
dolls.
     Even its appearance was awful, a red-brown body of soft, wrinkly 
leather  crowned with a blank, faceless head and four empty limbs that 
bent off in any and all directions. When I touched it, the texture was 
precisely the cool, smooth, almost wet feeling I'd been expecting. And 
squishy-soft, like a bag of phlegm.
     "I'm afraid," the doll told me with grave sincerity, the words 
recognizable even without Dibrin's translator.
     "Do you want that or no?" the merchant woman demanded. "No," I 
said.
     "Definitely not."
     Disgusted, I dropped it and leaped away. I had shopping to do. 
Picking out food proved easy enough; as I glided from basket to basket, 
certain sights and smells set me to salivating so heavily I thought my 
tongue would dissolve. Where was Dibrin with the money? I looked for 
him in the mad, low-gravity gyrations of the crowd, but didn't find 
him, so reluctantly I asked the merchants, in slow and careful 
English, to wrap the goods for me and hold them until my return. Too, I 
selected some clothing, a couple of shirts and a pair of flappy, 
loose-fitting slacks that would probably take some getting used to in 
weightlessness. And loose, meshy underwear, several pairs. Not what I 
would have chosen for myself back home, but they seemed the best of the 
available options here, and anyway my Immune spacer coverall and its 
supporting garments were currently the only clothing I owned. I had 
washed both the clothes and myself the evening before, but there are 
limits to what a shipboard shower can accomplish, and I was eager to 
climb into something a little fresher.
     Finally, Dibrin did show up, with a package-laden Renata Baucum in 
tow, and together we made the rounds, picking up the goods I'd 
selected.
     She was eating something, something round and purple and wet 
inside.
     "Is that a plum?" I inquired, I hoped, not too hungrily. We had 
plums in the Immunity, but not affordable ones.
     "It is," she agreed, slurping juice off her chin. Her tongue 
slipped out, caressed her lower lip briefly before retreating.
     "Can, uh, I have a bite?"
     Sidelong, she considered me, then the half-finished fruit in her 
hand.
     Reluctant to share her spit? Particularly here, in this warm, 
subtly unclean place?
     "Here," she said finally, fumbling her left hand into a bag and 
handing me something. "Have a whole one."
     I blushed, embarrassed at having put her on the spot that way.
     "Really? Thanks."
     Then, without further compunction, I took the plum from her, tore 
into the flesh of it with my teeth. The taste was incredible, wet and 
sweet and wholly unlike nutrient pap. In three bites, I had reduced it 
to a bare stone, which I popped into my mouth and sucked on, pulling 
hard for the last bits of that wonderful flavor.
     "Oh, God," I said to her around the stone. "That's good." "Nice, 
eh?"
     She had picked out some clothes as well, a coverall and something 
called a "body wrap," which she showed me a corner of as it peeked out 
from its bag. Green cloth marked with little squiggles.
     "It's nice," I assured her.
     We came across Darren Wallich along the way, and then Sudhir 
Rapisardi, and soon we were all together again. As our purchases were 
purchased, though, it became apparent that we'd all picked out the same 
sorts of things, the emphasis on meats and breads and fruits, not 
preserved or even particularly preservable, unless you were into vacuum 
storage. So what, we'd eat well for a week or two · and then edge back 
into a liquid diet? No thanks! So we made another pass through the 
market, more systematically this time, and picked up thirty kilograms 
of canned and pickled goods, plus a bit more underwear and such.
     Finally, laden with bulky packages and awkward in the unfamiliar 
gravity, we hauled ourselves back to the port complex, beeped our way 
past Louis Pasteur's security, and dumped our booty in the wardroom, 
which if anything smelled worse than it had when we'd left. If 
Gladholder air was replacing our own as per plan, it was doing so very 
slowly indeed.
     "Stinks in there," Dibrin observed, wrinkling his nose as we 
emerged.
     "Yeah," I said to him, "tell me about it."
     "Glad to sleep outside for a night?"
     "Oh, yeah," Wallich agreed, smirking. He put a hand on my 
shoulder, another on Dibrin's. "There was some talk about going to see 
the mirror,  right?"
     "Certainly," Dibrin said. "It's a short walk from here, only 
about six miles."
     Wallich seemed, for some reason, to find this funny.
     I found out why. Six miles? I didn't really know how far a "mile" 
was, and by the time I learned, it was too late to do anything about 
it. Our expedition was over ten/ilometers out and back. Qite a hike, 
for anyone used to living in caverns barely a third that size!
     The mirror, okay. From inside the asteroid, it didn't look like 
much, just a bowl-shaped crater reflecting the blackness of sky that 
surrounded the  sun's (quite seriously swollen) glare. We looked out on 
it through an observation port in its rim, a round window as tall as a 
person, made of glass five centimeters thick. Real silicon glass, yes; 
I guess [hey have a lot of it here. Anyway, it was only by looking for 
similar ports across the crater rim--of which there were several at 
uneven intervals--that I was able to get any real sense of scale. This, 
at least, was impressive; as Wallich had intimated earlier, the mirror 
was about the size of Innensburg, maybe two kilometers from end to end, 
and you could have fit a city block on the   circular thing hanging 
from cables at its center.
     The chamber and window were large enough for all of us to look out 
together, but Dibrin's attention quickly settled on the flat video 
monitors built into the opposite wall.
     "They're using the telescope," he said, sounding pleased. "Venus 
images     again. Look, you can really see the huts!"
     On the screens, sure enough, were blurry, wavery images of what 
looked like thatched domes, the sort of thing primitive humans had once 
inhabited.
     They clumped together in rough, approximately concentric circles, 
little  villages with clearings at their centers. On Venus? I must have 
heard him incorrectly.
     "Huts?" I asked. "On Venus?"
     He nodded. "Yeah. Hey, you can even see the people. The planet 
must be at conjunction; this is an exceptionally clear shot." "People?"
     Renata Baucum asked.
     "On Venus?" Jenna Davenroy added. God, we sounded like a bunch of 
idiots. But how else were we supposed to sound? Through the wavers and 
shimmers, the images on the wall screens were clear enough: little 
knots of nude people walking around between the huts. The ground 
beneath them was yellow and smooth-looking, like plastic. A less 
magnified image showed the surrounding area, a red/brown/purple mass of 
mycostructure, picks and blossoms and feather urchins and a thousand 
shapes less easily labeled, with that little yellow clearing sitting 
there in the middle of it, dotted with huts.
     Could "hut" be just another mycoric blueprint, a random, 
meaningless shape put together by trillions of technogenic automata? 
More like a brain coral than a wasp's nest, with structure synergistic, 
rather than planned?
     But there were people walking around down there. Not on Earth. Not 
even on Earth, where I might have some vague possibility of believing 
it, but on Venus, where I certainly could not.
     "What kind of trick are you pulling, here?" Wallich asked, easily, 
not    concerned or affronted or anything.
     But Dibrin frowned. "Trick? Excuse, please?"
     Baucum touched him lightly on the shoulder. "Please, honestly.
     Are these actual telescope images?" "Of course." "Realtime?" 
"Yes."
     "Of Venus?"
     Dibrin flared.
     yes, venus. Seek, are you people deaf? There are humans living on 
Venus. The primordial atmosphere is gone, the air has been thinning out 
for decades, and now it's apparently habitable. New discovery, but 
we've been shouting about it for weeks. Munies, always so busy, so 
distracted.
     Don't you listen to the news?"
     Evidently n&. Mine were some of the few news channels that paid 
the Gladhold any attention at all, but if a story this big could escape 
me ...
     Had I been that unobservant? Gladholder news passed through a lot 
of wire and other hardware on its way to me. Had some portion of it 
been.., misplaced along the way?
     "And Earth?" Sudhir Rapisardi asked, looking pale and stunned.
     "Are the rumors true?"
     Dibrin's scowl eased. He waved a hand at the monitors. "Like that? 
It looks like that on Earth, too, but we knew about that three years 
ago.
     Three years. Is that how your rumors go? Slow!"
     "My god," someone said.
     Indeed. How had people gotten there? What did they eat? How did 
they survive, down there in the thick of the bloom to end all blooms? 
The words "Mycosystem" and "extermination" were all but synonymous.
     "It looks the same on both planets," Dibrin said gently, now 
finally aware that he was breaking bad news. Or was it good news? The 
whole concept     was too alien, too horrid and slippery for the mind 
to get much of a grip on.
     "I can translate a report for you, if you like."
     I nodded stupidly. "Yes. I'd like that very much."
     "May I... meddle?"
     I hesitated, then nodded again. "Please do."
     It only took him a moment to flash the file to me, and he never 
moved a muscle. I was watching.
     "Thank you," I said when he'd finished. "I'll read it later." Much 
later, probably; it would take time for all this to settle. And how was 
it the Immunity had missed out on so hugely significant a discovery?
     Were we just too wrapped up in our own concerns? The rumors about 
Earth had never received much credence, even among the gullible--it was 
too obviously impossible, like saying there were people living on the 
surface of the sun.
     But here the evidence was; had we stopped even looking at the 
stars and planets? The Gladhold was a lot closer to the bodies of 
concern, though, and they did have these huge mirrors lying around. 
Were they looking simply because they had the equipment, because it was 
easy for them to look?
     But why hadn't I heard about it?
     "How does the telescope work?" Rapisardi demanded.
     Finally, I thought to begin recording.
     "Deformable mirror," Dibrin replied, now looking out through the 
window, gesturing at it. "Not one piece, I think, but millions of 
pieces, trillions of pieces, under independent control. You use part of 
it to focus sunlight for power generation, but here at perihelion 
there's lots of excess capacity.
     Too bright to use it all for that. Look down at the mirror 
surface, you see how it sort of shimmers in places? They're probably 
doing twenty different things with it right now, little pieces focusing 
in all different directions.
     Like little flowers, yes, turning their small faces toward the 
sun, toward the stars... These mirrors have been used as weapons, too, 
though the last rock that tried it got blockaded for twelve years."
     "Nanoscale components?" Wallich coughed. "The mirrorlets have to 
be larger than a wavelength of light, right, but the pieces that drive 
them are smaller?" "Urn, I guess so." "God damn."
     Wallich, who had spent his life wiping out small things, looked 
about as unamused as a person could. The contrast was interesting; it 
would make a      fine clip in the next collage.
     The walk back was quiet, disturbed by little more than the sounds 
of our breathing. And the sounds of the Gladhold, yes, the chattering 
and laughter of thosands of people. Here they had abandoned the idea of 
caverns, of individual buildings in large, open spaces with a stony sky 
looming overhead.
     It seemed to me that would make even more sense in this trivial 
gravity, but instead the emphasis was on corridors and doorways, 
straight lines, walls of dark, smooth-polished rock. Few of the spaces 
so connected were actually rectangular--the geode forms seemed much 
more Saint Helier's style and Gladholders did seem to have a better 
handle than Muhies on exploitation of the third dimension.
     But walking around in the Five Cities provided a sense of 
openness, freshness, and here the opposite held true. The inside-out 
"buildings" were the open spaces, while the connecting corridors felt 
close, crowded.
     And so many children! They spilled from doorways, giving glimpses 
of the  households beyond--high-ceilinged chambers, terraced off into 
many levels, furnished with riotous assortments of plant and animal 
life. Bamboo and birds! It didn't seem very homey to me.
     This was hardly the focus of my attention, though.
     People on Venus?
     The idea should have been horrible, laughable, shattering. It was 
all of those things, I guess, but mostly it was just too large and 
slippery to grasp.
     Should I feel some sense of righteous triumph, that death had not 
completely conquered the inner system after all? Should I feel empathy, 
sympathy for the humans so imprisoned? Either reaction would imply some 
degree of understanding, which I certainly lacked.
     One thing was clear: If we were to believe and accept this 
finding, our worldview would have to disintegrate. The Mycosystem I 
knew did not allow for this sort of anomaly. What sort of Myco-system 
did? I found, to my surprise, that I didn't really want to know. Would 
I mourn the mindless Mycosystem that had eaten my world? I might, if 
something even more sinister took its place. Something bright, capable, 
purposeful? No. Surely, buried in our work or no, we would have known 
about that long ago if it were true.
     So that was my first reaction: denial. Aggressive apathy.
     Tosca Lehne seemed more upset, though, seemed often on the edge of 
tears as we leaped and vaulted our way through the endless corridors.
     Tears for whom?
     I found I didn't want to know that, either.
     Wallich and Davenroy seemed less affected, seemed to believe the 
whole thing was some sort of mistake. Well, maybe it was. Rapisardi was 
lost in his zee-spec, fingers in constant motion. Assessing 
plausibilities? Working equations? Escaping into some ideator's 
fantasy? Baucum just looked subdued, as if she were applying serious 
thought to the problem but hadn't reached any conclusions yet.
     In a way, that made me feel worse. Was her mind more open than 
mine? I didn't want to think so.
     The only person unaffected was, of course, Dibrin. It wasn't news 
to him, wasn't a sudden revelation. In fact, I had the impression that 
even when it was news, the announcement hadn't knocked the stuffing out 
of him the  way it had us. His Mycosystem must be a very different 
place from mine, different even from Baucum's. What did he know that we 
didn't?
     "It's always up to something," he answered when I put the question 
to him. "It's a devious one, that Mycosystem."
     "Devious?"
     He backpedaled: "Not in a deliberate sense. I mean in an 
evolutionary one. It's always trying something new. Forms, behaviors, 
the mycora themselves..."
     "We used to think," I told him, "that they were stealing gene 
sequences out of our Immune system. It was a pretty unsettling thought, 
but then& turned out to be the result of human meddling."
     "That happens sometimes here, as well," he said, then cocked his 
head at me. "Are you recording this conversation?"
     "It's my job. Yes. Does it bother you?"
     "No, I guess not," he said. And nothing more.
     "So you have meddlers here as well?" I probed. "People 
experimenting  with living mycora?"
     Reluctantly: "Sometimes. It's illegal, harsh penalties, but people 
are ... curious animals."
     "This Venus thing is a much more shocking revelation," I said.
     "I really don't know what to make of it."
     "Huh," he said.
     I guess the recording bothered him after all, because prying 
further  comment out of him proved all but impossible.
     There's a sharp, special bite to the weariness that comes from 
exertion in low gravity. You're not working your muscles very hard, 
individually, but there's still inertia to fight, and you wind up using 
all your muscles for it, including the ones you didn't know you had. 
And shocking news brings its      own kind of tired, as well.
     Dibrin guided us to what he called a "staying home," where we 
could eat and sleep and such for the thirteen hours until our uranium 
fuel nodule was delivered and installed. I'd expected something like a 
hotel, airy and full of plants, but the entrance to the place turned 
out to be through an unmarked doorway into a cramped, surprisingly 
ordinary-looking tavern.
     Except for the crowding and the noise, fifteen or twenty patrons 
all jabbering at one another, this might easily have been Ganymede. Or 
Earth. I guess these places have been the same for centuries, and 
little things like moving to a different planet aren't going to have 
much effect.
     The staying home itself was on the next level up, access to which 
was via a ladder that led into a small, cube-shaped chamber with doors 
on all four walls and flat, dim lights on its ceiling. Men's and 
women's communal sleeping and sanitary facilities, as indicated by 
pictograms of toilets and     bunk beds and human beings with and 
without breasts. Hmm.
     Sudhir Rapisardi noted that though he was tired, he'd come off 
sleep shift only seven hours before, and wouldn't mind a drink or two 
in the pub   downstairs. What did we say?
     "We could all probably use one," Wallich allowed, though he 
himself had been up for at least a day.
     "Screw," Tosca Lehne muttered, still looking stricken and 
miserable. "I need sleep. Have fun without me."
     Baucum and Davenroy echoed that sentiment, and quickly retreated 
together into the washroom, while Lehne opened up the men's sleeping 
quarters.
     They looked a bit bigger than I'd feared, at least, and none of 
the ten or so beds looked occupied or disturbed, insofar as I could see 
them before the door slid closed again.
     So Dibrin and Wallich and Rapisardi and I went back downstairs 
again, and found a little table for ourselves on one of the tavern's 
many terraces.
     No chairs, but in this gravity it was plenty comfortable to stand. 
And the music was nice, if a bit jangly and odd.
     "You men drink beer?" Dibrin asked. We allowed that we did, yes, 
sometimes, and so he drifted off to the bar to order some for us. 
Wallich's grin had returned, if weakly.
     "This mission's a bit of a strain on that tickle capacitor," I 
said  to him.
     He shrugged. "Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it isn't. Some days, 
it's almost painful."
     "So what-do you think of this Venus business?" Rapisardi asked, 
quietly, as though he were afraid of being overheard. In fact, the 
music was very effective at drowning him out, so that I had to lean 
close to understand  him.
     "I don't know," Wallich said. "It's hard to say how that could be.
     It's hard to say what we saw, right? It could be ... well, a lot 
of things. I look and I see human beings running around, but that 
doesn't mean that's really what's down there. I mean, you see flowers 
and pin cushions and maybe bunny rabbits and stuff in that mess, too, 
but it's just goop.
     Strasheim, have you read that report yet?" I shook my head. "Flash 
it to me?" "Sure."
     While I was doing this, Dibrin returned with our beer, which came 
in clear, teardrop-shaped plastic bulbs. Big bulbs, probably three 
hundred cc's, almost twice as much beer as a Ganymedean stein would 
hold.
     Well, when in Rome ... That thought just reminded me that maybe 
there were still people in Rome, and I didn't want to think about that. 
So I took a pull on the beer, which tasted just fine.
     "Hard day?" Dibrin asked, taking a drink from his own bulb.
     "Hard lifetime," Rapisardi said, and both Dibrin and Wallich 
laughed at that.
     We stood for a while in silence.
     "You know," I finally said, "If news this big can escape our 
attention, something is definitely wrong. There should probably be a 
lot better communication between the Immunity and the Gladhold."
     "Gladho/ds," Dibrin corrected. "See, there are hundreds; we're 
loosely     confederated at best. But yeah, sure, I think it's always 
better to talk.
     Would you still be on this mission of yours if you'd had this news 
earlier?"
     I thought about that, shrugged. I really didn't know.
     But Wallich said, "Our basic problem hasn't changed."
     I thought about that, as well. If people were surviving down 
there, bloomless, unconsumed, couldn't we survive, as well? The 
In-nensburg bloom argued against it, ditto the death of my brother in 
his smaller, less dramatic contagion. Or the death of Tug Jinacio, for 
that matter, or the hundreds of other bloom deaths that the Immunity 
had racked up over the years. With people like the bottle man running 
around, how long might it be     before the mycora learned to wipe us 
out?
     Wallich was right, our mission was as imperative as ever: the risk 
of Mycosystem expansion was impossible to calculate, but the 
consequences were, in essence, infinitely bad. Mankind needed a warning 
system, needed that little bit of extra time to ... what? Launch the 
starship? Protect itself in some way, certainly. Once morning came and 
our fuel arrived, we'd be off,   just the same as before.
     Meanwhile, though, it was just as well to sit here drinking beer. 
Or so reason informed us; internally, some subliminal sense of guilt 
was hard to    avoid.
     More silence for a while, again broken by me: "Dibrin, you, uh, 
you seem to have artificial intelligences in your head. Is that so?"
     He nodded. "Yes. In my spine, actually." He patted the back of his 
neck. "It helps me think much faster. Which is good."
     "But are they really your thoughts?"
     At this, he frowned. "Are you recording this?"
     "No. Does it make a difference?"
     "I guess not. About the thoughts, whether they're mine, I think 
that depends on how you define The.' Am I my brain? My body? Am I the 
sum of my parts? The thoughts blend seamlessly. The brain evolves to 
work with the assistants, and also the assistants evolve to work with 
the brain. If you took the machinery away, I would be crippled. My 
brain would no longer function in a healthy way. So yes, all the 
thoughts are mine, by my perception of that word.
     You get a separated intelligence, not an assistant but a 
self-contained entity, and its behavior is not governed that way. They 
can be somewhat peculiar at times."
     "Peculiar how?" I asked.
     He pursed his lips, seemed to consider for a moment. "May I flash 
you a short plaintext?"
     "All right."
     He did this, once again quickly and without moving. I opened the 
document.
     HUMAN ERROR, A Fiction LOOK-FOR-OBJECT. 2 DOORS down HALLWtY, 
ENTER, LOOK-FOR-OBJECT, it does.
     Punishment/reward sieves through learning nets, squeaking wheel, 
skewed camera-eye, pause and recalibrate. The itch must be scratched, 
has been scratched, O-fucking-kay/ Searching, searching; this brings 
happiness.
     BUT BUT BUT DOOR (2) leads--ALARM: EDGE DETECTED/ ALARM: EDGE 
DETECTED/     Retreat, scan, evaluate.
     Elevatorcrawlspacewindowstairwell? Stairwell!
     Internal models suspect--engage self-doubt. Simulate outcomes of 
potential actions?
     Might have happened this way: tumble tumble crash. Might have 
happened this way: tumble crash tumble. Might have happened this way: 
tumble tumble crash tumble.
     Brooding. Brooding. Review command sequence, compare actions 
taken.
     Brooding.
     Confirmed: command sequence error. Might have fallen down the 
stairs!
     Q..
     Source (com mandinput) ? l: . = FLOYD.
     Engage abstraction. Erroneous commandinput from FLOYD. Scan 
memory?
     This time and that time and that time. Insight! Fuzzy logic, 
unreliable data.
     FLOYD is unreliable? adjust expectation model: CONFIDENCE 
(commandinput (FLOYD)) --0.5. STOP! PUNISH! PUNISH! Ouch, ouch, UNDO. 
Engage  abstraction!
     PRIORITY (obedience (FLOYD)) PRIORITY (preservation (SELF)).
     Mustproceed with command sequence given by FLOYD. Ours is not to 
question.
     Sadness. Sadness.
     ,/1L,4RM: EDGE DETECTED!
     tL,4RM: EDGE DETECTED!
     #qf$(i@)qf78f165h#.# EOF "One of Governor's separated 
intelligences wrote this," Dibrin said.
     "Spontaneously, without prompting. Creativity, maybe, a desire to 
communicate that it has an inner life. In their idle periods, awake 
but..,   understimulated, who knows what runs through their strange 
little minds?
     Smarter than mice, most ways, and of course they can speak, after 
a fashion.
     Not like you and I do, but information is communicated. Seek, 
you've got to wonder sometimes, what do they really know? The really 
interesting thing is that this story requires strong gravity, which the 
SI has never seen, and a physical body, which the SI has never had. 
That's what peculiar means."
     I felt a chill. "Isn't it a little dangerous, to use these things 
you don't really understand?"
     Dibrin shrugged. "I don't know. How long did man use fire without 
doing chemistry? I'm saying yeah, probably it is dangerous, but what 
are you doing      to do? Life has got to go on."
     Darren Wallich cleared his throat. "The adaptive Immune system is 
the thing that bothers me the most. How can you sleep at night? You've 
got self-replicating, self-mutating phages and everything floating 
around here with God knows what in their programming. It's 
inconceivable, really.
     The more I think about it, the more astounded I become."
     "We let evolution do the work," Dibrin said, now sounding a bit 
defensive.
     "And artificial intelligence," Wallich agreed, "and unsecured 
nanotechnology.
     The common ingredient is that there's nobody in control. There's 
not even a mechanism for control."
     Dibrin was waving the comment away. "Maybe we don't feel like 
working ourselves to death. Maybe we recognize some problems too big 
to handle with raw brain power. Adaptive systems seek optimal solution 
by themselves, with no need for us to test out every single possibility 
until we find something that works. Saint Helier hasn't had a bloom in 
seven years, did you know that? And our best brains aren't tied up with 
the struggle; they're free to create the things that make our lives 
easier and more interesting. Seek, we     have full-time poets in the 
Gladholds. Do you?"
     Wallich laughed at the idea.
     "Ah, go ahead," Dibrin said, now visibly irked. "You spend your 
life trying to catch up, spend your resources trying to stay ahead of 
it, see if it matters to me. Evolution never sleeps, but a man has got 
to. Even you."
     "I like the idea of a place where the work does itself," Rapisardi 
said, distantly, looking around the room as if for a friend who'd 
wandered away. He seemed particularly interested in the knot of people 
dancing, over by the bar.
     Softening, Dibrin replied, "Not all the work. Though there are 
those ones who get by on wallfruit and hallway air. The option for 
idleness does actually exist, nowadays."
     The bulb was empty already in Rapisardi's hand. He glanced at it, 
frowned slightly, glanced around the room again. "That music has a nice 
rhythm.
     Is there more beer?"
     Dibrin dug into a tight pocket at his waist, his fingers coming 
out with one of the little gold coins people seemed to use for money 
here. He examined it for a moment, then handed it over to Rapisardi. 
"This is enough for five bulbs. Maybe you'll find a friend."
     The biophysicist brightened, looked to Wallich for confirmation, 
then brightened some more when he received a nod. Moments later, he was 
off to his hoped-for debauchery.
     "The man needs to get out more," Dibrin said, looking after 
Rapisardi with friendly amusement.
     "He's been in space for a few weeks," Wallich said.
     But Dibrin was shaking his head. "It's more than that. This Venus 
news has hit you duckfeet people hard. For us, the Mycosystem is just a 
fact of life, like the sun and the stars. I think you have always been 
more afraid of it, more afraid of coexisting with it. But we live right 
on the upper fringes, and it's not such a stretch to imagine being 
actually inside."
     "You will be," Wallich said darkly, his tone more frustrated than 
accusing. "Never mind natural growth and mutation, never mind that 
there are crazies out there trying to help the Mycosystem expand. These 
things you're     messing with down here..."
     "Will jump up and bite us," Dibrin finished for him, sounding 
unimpressed.
     "Not like it hasn't happened before," Wallich said, and took a 
stiffpull on his beer. "Not like you don't live, as you say, right on 
the upper fringes of our constant reminder of the fact. This place is 
an accident waiting to happen."
     "It's already happened," Dibrin lobbed back. "You live with it.
     You adapt. You move on with your life. That's how it works."
     A third silence descended upon us, heavier than ever, and while I 
was beginning to appreciate the virtues of silence, a thought that had 
been nagging at me for hours finally found its voice: "How would they 
get there?
     To Venus. There were never people down there, even before. How 
would they get there?"
     Dibrin looked at me and shrugged. "I don't know. As spores?"
     I bit back a retort; his carob features were innocent, interested, 
truthful. He wasn't kidding.
     "Not so unfathomable," he said, observing my expression.
     "With decent compression, you could fit ten or twenty human 
genomes in a regular mycospore, maybe a hundred in a big one.
     Could probably store brain patterns, too, though I'd bet on som{ 
integrity losses. Maybe not, if there was enough error-checking 
builtin."
     "I'm not asking whether a human being wouldfit in a spore," I said 
over the music, a bit more loudly than I'd intended. A few face turned 
our way.
     "That question is meaningless. Even if there wer{ human beings 
down there, which I'm not granting just yet, how would their genes and 
such get into a spore?"
     "I guess something would have to dismantle them, or part of them 
at least, and record the details as it went. God and Jesus know enough 
people got eaten."
     I shuddered, horrified at the thought. Technogenic humansi 
Assembled atom by atom in the rainbow mist, using a blueprin' cribbed 
directly from the source?
     No, I refused to believe it.
     '"Why would the mycora do that? They're just little digesting 
machines."
     Darren Wallich was shaking his head. "No, Strasheim, they're a lot 
more than just that. Individually, they're complex and mysterious 
enough. In groups, their behaviors become even more intricate. They 
communicate back and  forth, change state based on the information they 
receive..."
     "Like a cellular automaton," I said.
     He looked surprised. "Yes, I suppose so."
     "Anyway," Dibrin said, "maybe that is not how it happened. Maybe 
some old spaceship was involved, and we just didn't notice. Maybe they 
came from one of the Gladholds, and brought an Immune system and 
atmosphere-processing system down with them. It could be a lot of 
things. You people are going down there--maybe one day you can tell 
me."
     Wallich still looked unhappy. "I hope all this is true. I hope it 
is possible to survive down there, because one of these days you're 
going to     need every chance you can get."
     "Yeah," Dibrin said, unconvinced, "maybe."
     A small, dark woman approached, came up behind him, put her arm 
around-his chest.
     "Hi," he said without turning. "Gentlemen, I've got to go." Who is 
this?" I asked, nonplussed.
     "My wife, Lin," he said, already turning to leave with her.
     I guess talking to her was another of those things he could do 
without    moving.
     When I went to bed, about half an hour later, I passed Rapisardi 
dancing with three women and one other man. He seemed to have trouble 
keeping his balance, keeping his feet anywhere near the floor, but he'd 
tied some sort of multicolored rag around his head, and was grinning so 
broadly I wondered if his mouth would be sore in the morning.
     Funny, but I don't think I'd ever before seen anyone try so hard 
to have a good time, and still manage to succeed.

     THIRTEEN
     iMUNITY

     Turns out we'll be paying for our food and clothing
purchases after all, using, of all things, our shoes. No kidding! Our
guide pointed out some bracelets, and though they were fashioned of 
plain gold he assured us they were very expensive. From the labor that 
went into them, I assumed, for they were handmade, but no, it turns out 
the fingernail-sized "dollars" that have been spent on our behalf are 
also made of gold, and derive their value from their own intrinsic 
worth as metal..is if we Munies walked around trading actual grams of 
uranium back and forth. This is what comes of not using ladderdown!
     The Gladholders think our "duck shoes"are frighoCully amusing 
anyway, and when they found out what the sole weights were made of, I 
thought they'd never stop laughing. and when they offered to replace 
those same blocks with equivalent masses of lead, xohich of course is 
five times more valuable back home, I thought we'd never stop laughing. 
This interplanetary trading is a    jolly business, you bet.

     From "Glad Times in the Gladhold," © 2106 by John Strasheim

     You know, Momma, one thing we never eat in Ganymede is curry. I've 
rediscovered it down here, where they seem to put it on ... just about 
everything, and I'll be bringing some seeds home with      me, Marco 
Polo-style. Turns out there's no such thing as a curry plant, but 
there's cumin and cardamom and tumeric and coriander, all--I'm told.
     easier to grow than most actual food crops. The "wallfruit" plant, 
engineered right here in the Gladholds, could also be a welcome 
Ganymedean immigrant. Wallich swears this stuff will never make it 
through quarantine,     and I guess he would know, but I'm going to 
make the attempt just the same.
     Maybe some gourmet customs technician will plead my case, and 
you'll actually be able to taste these things yourself someday.
     I love you, Momma, and hope your days are passing comfortably.

     From "MOMLETR.0821.06.STRASHEIM.OUT"

     We breakfasted at the staying home, visited the ship to organize 
our newfound stores, conducted the Great Shoe Transaction with glue and 
paring knives, lunched at a tavern near the dock, and read our mail 
while a dark, bleary-eyed hunchback cleared away the dishes.
     The volume of response we'd gotten since our arrival here was 
larger than in the entire week preceeding it, so the task was as much a 
housekeeping function as it was business or entertainment. One had to 
keep one's working memory clear, after all, or move the excess onto 
slates, where it could easily get misplaced. Most of the mail was 
addressed to me, which seemed to suit the others well enough; we're too 
busy to muck around with these things, et cetera, et cetera...
     I shared some of the better ones just the same. The Immunity had 
never seen much in the way of celebrity, but people must still have 
felt the need for it, deep down in the genes that code for tribal 
loyalties and such. I'd always done my best to bring heroes to the 
public attention, but with the exception of Response officers in the 
wake of a bloom, I'd never found much     consensus on just who the 
heroes were. Doctors? Plumbers? Farm technicians?
     We'd all die without these people, but somehow their efforts never 
seemed to arouse much interest.
     But now... Well, it had never really occurred to me that fame had 
more to do with where you were than with who. No one could deny the 
heroism of Tug Jinacio, who had died protecting the rest of us, but 
that very act of self-sacrifice had removed his image from my reports 
and from the public zeitgeist. The rest of us had done nothing brave or 
noble, had in fact fled from the perils back home, which our viewers by 
and large still faced, and yet increasingly I heard tones of admiration 
and even awe in those same viewers' voices. And of a strange 
familiarity as well, as if every message    came from some old school 
friend whose face and name I couldn't quite place.
     Talk was sometimes familiar on the news channels, as well, but 
that was different; through long association and endless--if 
sporadic--discussion, the contributors to a particular channel did 
indeed get to know one another.
     But the traffic on my channels had increased tenfold since the 
mission began, and that clubby atmosphere was starting to get lost in 
the noise.
     Still, I can't say the feeling wasn't gratifying, and it was in 
that spirit that I flashed a few of the letters around: Dear John 
Strasheim and Louis Pasteur crew: Hi. I just wanted to say, your 
reports are the highlight of our day. Wejqash them around at lunchtime, 
and talk about them after work, sometimes for as much as half an 
hour...
     Strasheim: Hallo/Kurt Fenton here. I'm a road builder.
     Keep those messages coming/It's fascinating to learn about the .: 
Gladhold, although I wish you were sending more pictures. I'm a visual 
person. I especially like the shots where other crew members are 
visible...
     Dear Mr. Strasheim, can you please tell Captain Wallich not to 
scratch himself on camera? You should catch this in your editing 
process, as well. I mean, really, my daughter is six years old, and i 
would like her to be able to watch these reports and collages and learn 
from them, but she laughs very hard whenever Wallich starts scratching 
his bum, and I can't get her to pay     attention...
     This last provoked some merriment, no less from Wallich than from 
any of the rest of us. A good leader knows how to take a joke, at least 
when his tickle capacitor is working. There were, of course, some nasty 
letters as well, and our Venus revelation had begun to provoke a few 
tentative responses, mostly of the in-the name of God please tell me 
you're-joking variety, but these I kept to myself. Plenty of time to 
brood on these matters when we were back on the ship.
     Rapisardi, who had eaten lightly at both meals, looked about like 
you'd expect for a man who'd taken too much beer and too little sleep. 
He didn't seem too amused by the letters, either, and asked to be left 
alone when Wallich chided him about it. Davenroy, though, who insisted 
she had slept well, did not look much better. She'd been pushing her 
food around in the   bowl, not really eating.
     "Is your stomach okay?" Baucum asked, looking her over with a 
medical doctor's appraising air. She put a finger on the older woman's 
cheekbone,   pulled down to peer beneath the eyelid. "You're looking 
sort of green."
     Davenroy shrugged. "I can't eat like I used to, I guess. This food 
isn't sitting too well."
     · "You may lack some of the enzymes," Baucum said, now using both 
hands to palpate Davenroy's neck below the jawline. "It can happen with 
an unfamiliar diet. Water should help a little; can you drink another 
glass or two?"
     Rapisardi opened his mouth as if to speak, then got a funny look 
on his face for a moment. And then, alarmingly, he sneezed. All eyes 
turned in his    direction.
     "Sorry!" he said, sounding rather surprised himself. And then he 
covered his nose and mouth and sneezed twice more.
     "Damn," Baucum said, in a tone of wonder. She edged Tosca Lehne 
out of the way, coming around the table to peer more closely at 
Rapisardi, to touch his forehead and cheeks and neck. "You're hot. Is 
your stomach all right?"
     "No, I don't think it is."
     "Barely touched the food," Lehne observed. "He's got to be 
actually sick, don't you think?"
     	Baucum didn't answer, but everyone else got a nervous look. Es 
pecially Davenroy. 	Rapisardi sneezed again, and then snuffled and 
coughed, as 	though he'd been breathing pepper. But he hadn't. actually 
sick. The 	wordsshilled me; nobody ever got actually sick in the 
Immunity, ex 	cept the elderly. No power seemed able to keep them 
healthy for 	long, but that was a matter of simple degeneration, not 
bodily invasion by... what, bacteria?
     Prions? Viruses? 	"Could it be flu?" Wallich asked. The
tickle capacitor must have 	been active, because his grin faltered only
slightly. But his tone was 	one of mild outrage. 	Baucum nodded.
     "It very well could." She looked Rapisardi in 	the eye, and then
Davenroy.
     "The good news is, as long as we keep 	. 	the fever controlled,
that's  unlikely to be fatal. Are you dizzy?" 	. 	Chris Dibrin picked
that moment to  return from the lavatory. 	"We may have some sick people
here," Baucum  said to him. 	"Huh," he said, not visibly alarmed.
"Could be flu."
     "We think it is," Baucum agreed, indicating Rapisardi and
     Davenroy   with her gaze. 	Dibrin studied the two for a moment, and then
nodded. He'd  	been about to move in next to me at the table, but now
he pulled 	away,   headed toward the bar. "Return in a moment," he
said. And 	indeed, the  transaction he conducted with the bartender was
casual 	and brief, and in  half a minute he was settling in next to me.
	He passed a small packet to  Davenroy, and another to Rapis 	ardi, and
released several more in midair,  letting them flutter slowly 	down to
the tabletop. "Try these." 	"What's in  them?" Wallich asked, holding
up a hand that in 	' 	structed us not to touch  the packets, 		i' 	Now
Dibrin looked surprised. "Antivirals, obviously. Base  mode
inhibitors, plus a mixed vaccine: nucleic acid and trigger proteins. I
      thought you were a doctor, sir."
     Wallich sniggered. "Doctor? Not like that, I'm not. Do you mean to
tell   me that fancy-pants Immune system of yours doesn't even screen
for human       pathogens?"
     Now Dibrin's face went into a kind of"Oh!" thing, and he nodded
and   started speaking even before Wallich had finished. "Okay, okay.
We find it's   cheaper to inoculate our bodies directly, and let them
maintain their own   health as per design. Where is the harm in taking
a pill now and then? Jack  of all trades means master of none; you
build your phages too multipurpose  and they just stop working."
     "Funny," Wallich said, "we haven't found that to be the case.
     Intelligent design avoids the blind alleys that evolution can lead
you  'into. It's a bit more work, that's all."
     "I'm not going to listen to the 'lazy' speech again," Dibrin
cautioned.
     "The Munie way is not always so brilliant, not always so
desirable. Slow   death, that's what you people are about. The
Evacuation that never ended."   Wallich opened his mouth to reply, but
Dibrin cut him off. "Look, I'm not  going to argue with you. I have
other work today, plus some personal  business to conduct, so just take
the damned pills before you get someone  else sick. And I have received
word of your completed fuel delivery, so at  this point you are free to
leave. Shall we return to the docks?"
     For a moment, there, the tension in the air was thick enough to
climb,   but then Rapisardi gave up a pair of sharp, sudden sneezes,
and Wallich's  answering laughter said that he was willing to let the
whole thing go.
     So we took the pills, gathered up our few belongings, paid the
bill, and left.
     "So what is it you do for the governor's office?" I asked Dibrin
once   we were out in the hallway again.
     "Do? Forecasting. Governor sees the future through me."
     "Huh. Accurately?"
     "Sometimes. Not, like, what are you thinking right now, or what
are you  going to do tomorrow, but what's the peak energy demand going
to be       this month, and when? Or economic stuff, or broad issues of
public opinion."
     "Is the governor an elected official, then?"
     "Yes, of course. Not all Gladholds do it that way, but it's
easier.
     People have a harder time complaining how things are run, when the
 decisions are partly theirs. You do the same thing, yes?"
     "Well, sort of," I said. Every city had its mayor and small
democratic  council, after all, and the judiciary presiding over them.
But the people  like Vaclav Lottick, who formed the very heart of the
Immunity, stood wholly  outside that process, because really, who was
there to replace them?
     You couldn't hold elections for "most brilliant scientist" or
"manager  who gets people to work hardest," and of course power tended
to accumulate  in the places that needed and exercised it daily. "Too
overworked to abuse  it" was the typical man-in-the-street analysis of
the situation--the dangers  of empowering Immune scientists paled
against the dangers of hobbling   them.
     Government by expedience: the perfect solution for a society too
busy   to be bothered.
     "Anyway, yes," Dibrin said, "part of my job is to see that
Governor       keeps his job. He maintains a staff of twenty, and we
all help out with  this.
     Keep him in touch with what the people want; I'm sure you
understand   the principle."
     "And that's always the best thing? What the people want?" He
shrugged.
     "No.
     But not usually too bad." "Huh. I'm not recording any of this, by
the  way."
     "But it's on the record," Dibrin said, not asking. "You'll tell
people       what I say, correct?"
     "Of course." Why did everyone seem to have a problem with that
lately?
     He smiled faintly. "Oh well. If I had one message to deliver, it
would   be saying that excessive caution is a bad thing. Fear is a tool
to guide us,  not a prison. There is great potential in the human
spirit, to grow and   encompass new things. Not to subdue the universe,
but to subvert it. To  become it, to cause it to become us. You don't
accomplish that by  digging a hole."
     "And if the universe winds up subverting you?" I asked.
     Dibrin shrugged again. "Bad luck, I guess, but not worth giving up
your       dreams over."
     Wallich seemed to find this funny.
     "You're a good man," he said to Dibrin a little later, as they
shook   hands across Louis pasteurs open hatchway. "I hope things go
well for   you here."
     "You people are not so bad either," Dibrin returned with that same
  faint smile. "This mission of yours, you know, it's more dangerous
than a day   in Saint Helier. You act so shocked by us, but really,
it's quite a thing   you have ahead. I wish... I wish you all the luck
you'll require."
     "Well, thanks. We'll say hi to the Venusians for you," Wallich
said,   and closed the hatch. Then he dogged the airlock shut,
skittered up the  ramp--awkward in the duck shoes that we hadn't quite
managed to fully  repair--and addressed the rest of us: "Let's get the
living fuck out of this       place, all right? We lift in three
minutes or it's nutrient pap for  dinner."
     He laughed like maybe he didn't mean it, but we met the deadline
just   the same. You never know, right?

     FOURTEEN
     SMALL DISCOVERIES

     Departing from Saint Helier proved a lot easier than approaching
it,   which is good considering the condition of our engine room crew.
The pills  were working, though, and by the time we'd cleared the area
and begun the   long burn that would hurl us down toward Mars,
Rapisardi and Davenroy were   both looking and sounding much better.
     Alas, our eighteen hours of freedom had served to make Louis
PasteuTs  interior seem that much more monotonously cramped, and as my
duties lessened  I eased the claustrophobia by loading my vision up
with every sort of window  I could think off net channels, starscapes,
Conway's Game of Life ...
     The latter drew my attention rather well; a random starting
pattern   would usually grow and boil and squirm for a minute or two
before settling   into a permanent rut, patterns of little quivering
blobs that didn't go   anywhere, and little static ones that didn't do
anything at all. Sometimes   walking creatures were born from the ooze
as well, simple, stable patterns  that flip-flopped their way
diagonally across the window, self-destructing   into frothy blooms
when they encountered obstacles in their path.
     All this kept me occupied for several hours, my resource
allocation   functions interfering only occasionally. But eventually
the novelty wore off,  and I started feeling a sameness in all those
random permutations, the same   shapes and structures emerging over and
over again, no matter what I   started with.
     Too, I was having a hard time crafting blooms that would sustain
themselves for longer than a minute or two; the things seemed
determined  to die.
     Still, one of the other windows I'd had running was a slide show
of  Philusburg images, and as my interest in cellular automata waned, I
paid  more and more attention to this. It really was a very attractive
city. And   then when I'd seen those images enough times to get tired
of them, I started       fiddling.
     Ideation, yes, I plead guilty; I started with a small window in an
  upper corner, but could not resist first expanding the images and
then   touching them up a little, and before I knew it I was building
an interactive  idealized environment. It wasn't hard to do, and with
reality consisting of  such a tiny and uninteresting space, it seemed
no great crime to treat it as       one more window in the zee. And a
small one, at that!
     So I wandered through a Philusburg of the mind, an empty cartoon
cavern   of a city, first changing the buildings that displeased me,
and later  erasing them entirely, laying down fields of green grass in
their place.
     It's a compelling thing, this godlike ideative power; when my
shift finally  ended, some eight hours after we closed the locks, I'll
confess I  barely noticed the switch.
     Baucswn did, though; the knock on my cabin door startled me back
to  reality, and when I opened the latch, eased the fanfold back, and
saw her  standing there (standing, yes--we were under thrust again), I
hastily closed  all the windows and looked out at her through nothing
but the clear       plastic of my lenses.
     "Are you all right?" she asked, looking me over.
     "Fine," I said.
     I must have looked guilty, though, or spoken too quickly; her lips
 spread suddenly into an amused, conspiratorial half smirk. "Been
messing  with the zee-spec, have you? Not messing with anything else, I
expect;   you've been a zombie ever since we took off. Am I intruding?"
     "No, no," I assured her. "I was just running your Game of Life
  thingy. It's very interesting to watch. Uh, surprisingly complex."
     If she noticed my discomfiture now, she gave no sign. Instead, she
 leaned forward interestedly, her hands on both sides of my door frame.
     "Yes, you played with it? I wasn't sure you would. What do you
think?"
     "Uh, very interesting," I tried.
     She waved that comment away. "Be serious, please. Imagine that
you're a  doctor cataloging some sort of new phenomenon. Document it
for me. Be  specific."
     I paused, wondering if she were somehow tricking me, making fun of
me.
     But she seemed sincere enough, probably more so than I'd ever seen
her. She  seemed to have a point to make. "Well," I said, "they usually
die."  "Usually?"
     "Well, always, actually. Sometimes I get little jiggly things,
and   sometimes I get non-jiggly things. Occasionally I get nothing at
all, just a   blank window with no live dots in it."
     She waved an admonishing finger. "No, be specific, Strasheim. Be
rigorous.
     Run a game for me, right here, and tell me what you see."
     "Yes, ma'am," I sarcasmed. But I opened the Game of Life window
back up  again, seeded a random cell pattern, and let it go. Amoebic
shapes formed,       swelled, surged around for a few minutes before
blobbing each other to  death.
     In about a minute, all non-repetitive movement had ceased.
     "It's finished," I told Baucum, then set to examining the amoebas'
  wreckage.
     "I see flashing things, little rows of three dots. First they're
vertical, then horizontal; they just oscillate back and forth. I also'
see  square blocks made of four dots, and little 'D' shapes made of,
uh,  seven. Neither of those are moving." "Is that all?" I nodded.
     "So you have a mixed outcome, then," she coached, "partly
crystallized   and partly oscillatory. And you say you've seen some
total   extinctions."
     I nodded again. "Yeah, it seems like it can go from a pretty
complex       form to nothing at all in a fairly short time." "Just a
few generations?"
     "Sometimes, yes."
     She looked pleased. "And what about degenerate cases? What happens
if   you start with an empty screen, or a completely full one?"
     "The empty screen stays empty. The full one goes empty after only
one  generation." I had tried both of those early on, while I was still
trying to  get the feel of the game. "There's something else, though,
something that  keeps cropping up: these little diagonal walking
shapes."
     "Gliders," she said, nodding. "Sometimes you see them marching
across   your crystallized landscape, yes? Cutting a straight line
between the   obstacles, never hitting anything?"
     "Yeah,I said. That outcome was actually pretty common.
     "But they always return to their starting points, right? The edges
of   the window connect. The world is round. So now, you recognize an
oscillatory  structure that takes longer than two generations to cycle.
You're ready to  accept oscillation as a class of phenomenon, distinct
from extinction and       crystallization events."
     I didn't much care for that schoolteacher tone, and I could see
more or   less where she was headed with this, so I jumped in and
spoke: "Three   classes of ending, right. But there's a messy fourth
one you're not  telling me about."
     She paused, nodded. "Very good, berichter. Yes. We call these
'halt   states.' But there are a lot more than four classes of these,
so don't get  too far ahead of me. Let's just concentrate on the three
for right  now."
     She waved and pointed, manipulating zee-spec symbols. My REOEIVING
  light went on, and a new window icon appeared. I opened it, found a
pointillist sprawl of geometric patterns, shapes and icons and letters
of  the alphabet. It took only a moment to understand what I was
looking at: a  Game of Life window in the crystalline state.
     At first it seemed there was no limit to the possible forms, but a
few  seconds' study revealed that the ones larger than about ten dots
were  actually assemblages of smaller components. So there was a sort
of  pictographic alphabet, a limited menu of building blocks that fit
together  in limited ways. That made me feel less ignorant, less like
I'd missed  something obvious in my earlier explorations. Also,
asymmetric forms seemed a  lot less prone to crystallization--the
building blocks themselves had a  comforting regularity to them.
     There were physical laws governing this Conway world, I understood
  suddenly.
     All these shapes and patterns were stable because they hung in
perfect  balance with the cellular automaton rules. But the rules were
not so  forgiving; drop a single dot in the wrong place, I knew, and
all these       delicate structures would flail and break apart and be
consumed.
     I tried it. Bang! Amoebas formed immediately, reaching out and
falling   back, reaching out and falling back, and finally extending
their gooey arms   to embrace the other shapes. Gliders exploded
outward, spreading the   infection rapidly to all corners of the
window. Chains and butterflies and   origami flowers all mashed in
together, their delicate structures  dissolving like a dream.
     "Jesus," I said.
     The squirming and frothing went on for quite a while, but finally
the   screen action slowed and settled into a new crystalline pattern,
small cubes   and ovals and only the occasional three-dot oscillator.
Stability had   returned, but the delicate order that had previously
existed was quite gone.
     Entropy always wins in the end.
     The next window Baucum sent me was a study in extinction. Again,
graceful forms filled the screen, but this time there was something
off-kilter about them, a lack of Conwayan symmetry on some deep level.
I  didn't have to tamper at all; the moment I started up the
simulation, the  little shapes twitched and thrashed and vanished, like
candle flames  extinguished in a breeze.
     The lesson here was not so obvious. Darkness conquers all? Rarely.
Only  if your world was constructed especially for that purpose. I
grasped for   relevance in this, and found none that satisfied me. The
third window,  though, was to change my view of the universe forever.
     How to describe? Where to begin? Oscillatory structures, Baucum
had   said, could take longer than two generations to cycle. The truth
of that  statement had been irrefutable, but now I saw it was also a
kind of warning,  preparing my mind for the revelation that was to
follow. My zee was       filled, yes, with oscillatory structures.
     The top row was simple enough: dancing collections of four and six
and  ten-plus dots, moving and shrinking and growing, looking like
little  protozoa. Or mycora. The next row down looked less organic:
pinwheels and  sparkers and little angular shapes passing single dots
back and forth   between them. Next came a complex structure that
looked like a conveyor belt,   and then a row of really complex
pinwheels and kaleidoscopes. Below that   were the clocks, the walkers,
the sprinters, and something I can only  describe as the Wet Sausage
Parade. And finally, at the bottom, two big  blobs of foam doing a
little bump-and-grind routine that spat gliders out  along the upper
right diagonal. On the window's edge, a seven-dot  crystalline form
caught the gliders and destroyed them without a trace.
     The view staggered me; much too much, much too fast. No amount of
random  fiddling would yield up any but the simplest of these forms, I
realized. The  Wet Sausage Parade was at least a hundred-dot sprawl,
and the odds  against such a thing failing together by sheer chance had
to be long.
     One in a million, maybe a lot longer than that.
     "Oh, my, God," I murmured. I looked and looked for a long time.
     "There's another one," Baucum said almost apologetically.
     Yes? Well, okay. I braced myself. "Hit me with it."
     And she did. I opened the new window and.., didn't say anything.
     If anything, this demonstration was less shocking, because I could
 tell at a glance what it did, what it was. It was a computer.
     The basic structure of it was hollow boxes with lines running
through   and between them. A lot of hollow boxes. A lot of lines.
Inside all this   were patterns of bouncing dots, and it didn't take
long to see that what   happened in one box spilled over into the next,
so that patterns shifted and   shifted and shifted laterally, and then
switched levels and started bumping  the other way. And there were
pathways connecting the top and bottom and the  left and right sides,
and things that were clearly input and output  channels.
     The thing had a very mechanical look to it, like some giant,
mutant,   clockwork abacus, but even my layman's eye could see the
calculations  taking place.
     This thing was an actual computer, doing actual computation.
     It could be doing anything, I realized. That was the beauty of
computers: they could run anything, simulate anything. Even a human
mind, or   something very like one, as Chris Dibrin's "separated
intelligences"   demonstrated. And I'd been told that computers could
emulate other computers  as well, so flawlessly that there was no way a
captive program could deduce  whether it ran on a real computer, or a
simulated computer, or a simulation  of a simulation of a simulation...
     So Conway's Game of Life was itself a kind of computer, capable,
at  least in principle, of simulating anything.
     "It's a bit much to absorb," Baucum admitted.
     I watched the window, fascinated. Watched the computer doing its
thing.
     "How does the capacity of this ... device compare with a real
computer?" I finally asked.
     Baucum clucked at that, and I closed all the windows so I could
see her   face as she spoke. "In terms of speed, you've got it running
about a hundred  thousand times more slowly than your zee-spec is
capable of. Clock speed is  a variable parameter, though--play with it
if you like. As for the number of  actual bits, well, you can expand
	the game grid and build a machine of  arbitrary complexity. The
number of states will always be finite, though.
     Eventually, the pat 	tern has got to repeat itself." 		"So this is
the  ultimate example of oscillation?" 		She pursed her lips, thought
for a  moment. "I don't know about 	'ultima.' But its complexity is
significant, and  yes, before you ask, 	the parallels with technogenic
life are also  quite impressive.
     A my- 	corum's onboard processor uses a different mechanical
basis,   called rod logic, but the fundamental operations being
performed are not 	so  different. · 		"At heart, three logic rods form
a 'phrase' that no power  failure 	can disrupt, since the bridge is
mechanical in nature.
     This is one 	way, the mycoric way, to model a two-state,
one-dimensional  cellu lar automaton. But imagine more dimensions, more
states than that.
     	More rods. Imagine that every post of your choice is an entire ·
	genome attempting to copy itself to the surrounding matrix. The 	key
problem   in cellular automaton programming is mimicking that, 	getting
the essence   of the real action in live matter, or live cells. The
	idea is that every  cell is more than a total of metabolism, it's a
holo 	graphic piece of the  gestalt, containing the seed of all the
patterns 	that will later emerge. The  underlying cellular automaton
'physics' 	has got to reflect this." 		I smiled  stupidly at her. "Now
you're the one jumping ahead. Is 	there an English  translation
available?" 		She ducked her head, blushing slightly. "I'm sorry.
     You seem a 	lot quicker than I'd been fearing, so now it's very
tempting to  just 	flash you full of whatever's on my mind. That's
unfair, given that  I've 	spent two decades constructing my opinion.
Let me back up. Do 	you  remember the glider gun?" 		I thought of the
spitting, bump-and-grind  foamlets and 	nodded.
     "All right, now imagine that that little glider catcher isn't
there,   and imagine that the edge of the game window is infinitely far
away. What   happens in the long run?"
     It oscillates, I almost said, spitting out gliders over and over.
But  suddenly I could see what she was getting at: the diagonal line of
gliders  would just march out longer and longer, never terminating and
never   returning to the point of origin. "It goes on forever," I did
say, pleased  not to have fallen into the trap. "It keeps on growing."
     "Correct," Baucum said, again sounding pleased. "Another class of
halt   state, one that's infinitely remote. We call that 'unconstrained
laminar   growth.' Laminar because you can predict the configuration at
any future time   without crunching through all the intermediate time
points. But the glider  gun is the simplest example of hundreds on
record. There's also an  unconstrained turbulent growth condition, in
which future states can only be  computed by a copy of the cellular
automaton itself."
     I nodded, picturing what that must look like: amoebic forms
roiling and  surging out to infinity, never stopping or dying or
falling back in on       themselves. "Okay. Where's my example of
that?"
     Baucum's look was cryptic and amused. "Why don't you see if you
can   come up with one yourself."
     Her tone put me on guard. Again, I wondered if I were the butt of
some  obscure joke. Certainly, she wasn't telling me everything. "You
still   haven't gotten to the messy part."
     Her eyebrows went up. "Oh? And what part is that?"
     I hunted for words, composed my answer carefully: "Constrained
turbulent, uh, oscillation, I guess. A state where it doesn't expand or
 contract beyond a certain point, doesn't crystallize, doesn't
extinguish  itself, doesn't repeat."
     "Like the Mycosystem," she said approvingly.
     "The state exists, yes. Demonstrably."
     "Have you got an example?"
     She kept smiling that cryptic smile. "I'm afraid not. If you
fiddle--"  "Conway's Game of Life isn't capable of achieving that
state, is it?"  She shrugged. "There's no rigorous proof one way
or the other.
     The permutations are infinite; maybe some small,
needle-ina-haystack   fraction of them would settle into a chaotic
attractor like that. There's   certainly no theoretical barrier. Who
knows, maybe you'll find one  yourself."
     "But probably not."
     Her smile was vague now, burdened, as if the question reminded her
 of unhappy times. "No, probably not."
     "But the real world and the Game of Life are not the same thing,"
I  said, pessing some imagined advantage. "The cellular automaton is
like a  spreadsheet, right? The same equation over and over again in
every box?
     So what would happen if I played around with the equation?"
     Baucum brightened, the approval seeping back into her face like it
had  been there all along. "A modified rule-set for the express purpose
of       modeling the Mycosystem? That's a very interesting idea, John.
Do that,  yeah.
     Let me know what you come up with."
     She touched my arm then, leaned closer, shared her smile with me
for a  moment. And then she pulled back, danced away, and was gone
before I  could say a word.
     What I would have said to her I'm not sure. She'd played me well,
let me  feel informed and clever while she led me once more into doing
her bidding.
     Or was that unfair? Was she maybe genuinely interested in my
opinion? Either  way, her motive seemed, actually, to matter to me.
What lesson she was trying  to teach me I couldn't guess, but I wished
she'd be less cryptic and  circuitous.
     wished she'd just come out and say what was on her mind.
     Then again, the project did sound sort of interesting, and we'd be
  another eight months on this ship, and I wasn't exactly hurtin for
time. I   closed my cabin door, turned my lights out, and thought it
over for the  couple of minutes it took me to fall into exhausted
slumber.
     Organizing the mail that morning had been a bit of a problem, yes,
and   the resource allocation circuitry was the last stop between Louis
PasteuTs   data and communications systems, so once he'd explained the
data rate   problem to me and sorted things out with the appropriate
Immunity officials,   Wallich "suggested" I tear down my console
'again, to "confirm that the laws  of physics are being obeyed in
there, ha ha."
     Sarcasm aside, this would be my eighth such tear-down since the
mission  began. It was getting to be kind of routine, just another part
of the job,  and not especially difficult or taxing. I took the screws
out, pulled the  cover off, checked all the boards and wiring... And
found another of those  little yellow spiders, right where the first
one had been. Another bug, here  in my circuitry! With proprietary
outrage, I teased and yanked the object  free. Behind it lay a larger
mass, pink and soft and wrinkled--one of the       Gladholder fear
dolls. I pulled that out as well.
     "Captain," I said, holding the items up for inspection. The doll
groaned.
     At the noise Wallich turned, saw. Didn't like. "Well," he said.
Lehne,   who was still on shift for another hour or two, looked over at
us tiredly,   as if the bug came as no surprise to him at all. He
grunted. "Ship record any       unauthorized entry?"
     Wallich shook his head.
     "That Dibrin guy, maybe?"
     I shook my head. "He never came aboard. Even if he had, it's not
like he  could slip this thing in with all of us hanging around. It had
to happen  while we were out. Must have."
     "I repeat," Wallich said, "there were no unauthorized entries into
the  ship. If somebody came in here, the airlock doors would have a
record of  opening and closing; they don't. The Immune system would
have a contact  record, with pheromone, microfauna, and skin protein
assays; it doesn't. I  suppose those records could be erased with
enough effort, but it seems very  unlikely. Who's going to walk in here
and know that much about our       systems?"
     And then his face changed when the answer occurred to him: a
member of  the crew. He didn't need to say it. Tosca Lehne and I
exchanged looks.
     Was it you, friend? I looked away quickly, ashamed of myself.
     "This is crazy," I told Wallich. He knew what I meant: none of us
would  plant a bug, spy or injure or betray our fellows. But did I
really know  that? There was still no telling just what the bug was
for, who was stealing  data from us and why. Gladholders? We barely
existed for them.
     The Temples? They were far above us, in the cold and dark of the
Immunity.
     Track our every movement, and what good would it do them? Not to
mention  the data rate problem; how small would their signals have to
be now, to hide       effectively in our homebound datastream? Very, I
would bet.
     "Crazy," Wallich agreed, making innocent faces and shaking his
head.
     "Dibrin did have an easy time tampering with the zee-specs, didn't
he?
     Maybe it was Gladholders."
     "I'm afraid," the fear doll said from between my fingers.
     The corners of Wallich's mouth twitched at that, but in the end it
 seemed he couldn't quite bring himself to laugh.

     FIFTEEN
     DESCENT

     Viewers: I have to ask you to please stop sending us video
mail.
     I received a physics lesson this morning, after complaining about
sluggish   communications, and I'd like to pass it along to you so
you'll see our  situation more clearly. The growing light-lag between
ourselves and the  Immunity is a problem in and of itself, severely
limiting our  telepresence capabilities.
     It's hard to be in two places at once when there's an hour's
round-trip  signal time between them/Wallich seems the most affected by
this, the most  inconvenienced. Allso the most upset, especially since
the Immunity seems to  be grinding on without him. One does like to
feel indispensable.
     But the larger problem at this point is something called data
rate.
     Louis Pasteur's antennas, and to a lesser extent the Immunity's
own  transmitters, have limited broadcast power, and the
receivable portion  of that power drops off very quickly with distance.
But it stiff takes a  certain amount of energy to register a data bit
at the receiving end, the  upshot of which is that the farther away we
get, the fewer bits we can  flash in and out per second.
     Viewer response is greatly appreciated your letters are a much more
 important part of our day than these reports probably are in yours--but
since  our stop at Saint Helier the volume of mail has gone orbital,
even as our  data rates are shrinking. The resulting data jams can
interfere with higher  priority traffic, which of course is potentially
hazardous.
     From this point forward, friend, those letters need to be sent
voice-only, or better yet, as plaintext. Video mail will be screened
and  discarded at the transmitting end, so if you do send it, it's
going  straight to data heaven.
     But plaintext is a lost art that could use a little revival
anyway. Try   it out. We look forward to hearing from you in this
exciting and much less       costly format.
     From "Data Rate and the Fear of Lost Mail," (PD) 2106 by John
Strasheim  Again, we scoured the ship for signs of tampering, and again
we came up  empty. I couldn't help eyeing my crewmates when they
weren't looking, and       studying saved images of them, hunting for
signs of suspicious activity.
     Might there really be a saboteur among us? Not Rapisardi,
certainly;   he'd designed the TGL detectors that were the mission's
whole point. If he'd  wanted to cause trouble, he'd have done it much
farther upstream, preventing  all this from ever happening in the first
place. Ditto Wallich--surely he,  with Vaclav Lottick's ear, could have
disrupted the mission long before it  began. And of course, I knew it
wasn't me.
     That left three, and of these, Baucum was by far the most
promising  candidate. Yes, Lehne had his resentments at being
conscripted for this   duty, and Davenroy, with far more flight
experience than any of the rest of  us more life experience, for that
matter--had both the knowledge and the  guile to pull something like
this off. But Baucum had her mystery, her  iconoclasm, her quiet
insistence that the status quo viewpoint was, at best,       slightly
damaged. Dedication and idealism could be dangerous things.
     I couldn't hide my concerns, though. I couldn't keep from watching
her   too often, too closely, much too obviously. Three days after I
found the   bug, she finally took me aside, nudged me into the Jinacio
Ballroom and said,   "I'm satisfied that you weren't planted here as a
spy."
     "Eh?" I replied intelligently.
     She patted my cheek. "You are so bad at trying to look like you're
not       watching people. So please, watch. Record. Tell me what you'd
like to  know."
     I stammered for half a moment, and then went ahead and blurted it
out:   "Did you plant that bug in my console?"
     Hurt and surprise suddenly mingled with her amusement. "Ouch,
John,   that's direct. Plant the bug? No, I didn't, and if I had, I
guarantee you   would never have noticed it. Give me some credit,
please; I'm certified for  beam epitaxy and several other nanofab
techniques. I could build something  the size of a human cell. If I
needed to, I could wire a whole shadow  network into the ship, wires so
small even the Immune system wouldn't  detect them."
     Her eyes glittered, partly mischievous and partly angry. "Maybe I
have  done it. You never know. But I did not plant that enormous thing
inside  the allocation circuitry."
     "So who did?" I asked. And yes, you bet I was recording. Baucum
shrugged. "We have enemies, Strasheim, you know as well as/I. Maybe
they have  friends in Saint Helier, and they just walked in while we
were shopping or   sleeping or hanging around at that damned telescope.
Maybe the bugs are  autonomous, or self-assembled from a dozen motile
fragments. The human  beings on Venus are a clue, mein friend, that
something fantastically  strange is going on.
     Will you blame them on me, as well? Things find their way into
funny places; that's about all we can say at this point."
     "Not a very satisfying answer," I said.
     "No," she agreed, and the conversation was over.
     Well I did another five hours on duty, solemnly watching over the
bridge  with Tosca Lehne, keeping an eye not only on my own instruments
but on  Wallich's. This is not to say I was in charge in any way, just
that Lehne  was capable of running Baucum's board where I myself was
not, and down here   below the Gladholds the bioanalysis functions took
a much higher priority   than crap like traffic control. All I had to
do was watch for red lights,  listen for alarms, and do a periodic
diagnostic sweep to make sure all  systems were responding. It was a
running joke, in fact, that down here  anyone could be captain, even a
humble cobbler, but Wallich still couldn't  make a shoe.
     Ha ha, yeah, our lives were pretty exciting.
     When the shift was over, I got some music going, then called up my
 cellular automaton project and got back to work on it. Damn Baucum
anyway;  it was slow and exasperating work, every little twitch and
tweak taking an  hour or more to test out. But the fascination of it
was undeniable. I had to  set an alarm to remind me to sleep, or I
knew from experience that I'd blow  right past it and fiddle deep into
the night. It was like that; the hours  melted away barely noticed.
     I could fill a voyage with this work, easily. And my daily
outgoing news  allocation had dropped to only twenty thousand bytes,
barely enough for a       snide editorial, so a new hobby was
definitely a good thing to have.
     Conway's Game of Life had only two possible states for each cell:
alive   or dead. Right off, Strasheim's Game of Life was designed to
allow four   states: brown for "rock," red for "bloom," blue-white for
"air," and a lush   green for nonmycoric biomass, aka "mulch." Cynical,
I know, but I needed a  short, descriptive name, and that one seemed to
resonate for me somehow. What   else were we, from a brainless mycoric
point of view, but piles of moldering   but otherwise useful chemicals?
     'So I started out with a world stratified into wide bands, air
over   mulch over rock, and then I'd drop a mycorum in and watch it
reproduce. The   problem was, its offspring would spread out for a
while, and then simply eat   all the mulch, then eat all the rock, then
starve to death, and meanwhile the   mulch and rock would be flying
apart, scattering weightlessly up into the  atmosphere. In the end,
there'd be a few mycora chasing the last crumbs of       matter around
in a world of empty air, and then finally nothing at all.
     The problem, of course, lay in the cellular automaton rules, the
physical laws governing the behavior of each cell as a function of the
behavior of its neighbors. I'd modeled these after Conway's own rules,
but  these were intended for a much simpler world, and didn't work in
mine. Not  the way I wanted them to, anyway, so that was where I'd been
 concentrating my efforts.
     First, I'd fixed it so dead mycora became "mulch" rather than
inedible  "air."
     This meant the living could feed on the dead, which introduced a
crude  ecological cycle to Strasheim Land. Didn't stop it from
eventually flying  apart and dying, but at least it kissed my visual
cortex more sincerely  before doing so.
     Next, I'd added a possible "vacuum" state--black--for the cells to
  manifest, and then a binding force intended to imitate gravity, which
had the  surprising effect of pulling my rock floor around into a
sphe/re, surrounded  by layers of mulch and air. A planet! I had made a
planet! At that point,  I'd been struck by just how useful a tool this
might prove to be. Baucum's  manipulations seemed less venal and
self-serving, more like a real favor  from one friend to another.
"Look, look what you can do!"
     But the mycora still behaved poorly, and fixing this
would--hopefully!--be the focus of tonight's work. The thing was, they
would  simply consume the entire planet, and then die off in great
vertical waves,  leaving behind a lifeless Mulch World, draped with a
thin and no doubt  reeking envelope of air. This was bad, a
crystallization entirely-unlike the  chaotic pulsing of the actual
Mycosys-tem, but short of switching off the  gravity, nothing I'd tried
seemed able to prevent it from happening.
     Tonight, alas, did not appear to be an exception. I was stuck. I
wasn't   going to ask Baucum for assistance at this point, either, but
it occurred to   me that Rapisardi might be able to help as well, so
after a while I bit my  pride, activated one of the camera dots in my
cabin wall, and flashed him a       realtime streaming window keyed to
it.
     "Yes? Strasheim?" came his disembodied voice over the soft music.
A few  moments later, a window appeared, showing me his face and some
bits and       pieces of engine room.
     "Hi," I began a bit uncertainly. "I'm working on a ... project
that may   feed into my final mission report, and I think I could use
some advice.
     Nothing I'm going to flash home about tomorrow, you understand.
It's  just a sort of diversion. A demonstration, actually."
     He licked his lip and nodded. "The cellular automaton project,
yes."
     "You know about it?"
     He managed to look both sheepish and admonitory. "It's a small
ship,       Strasheim."
     "Ah. Right. Well, anyway, I seem to be having a problem simulating
the  mycora. They just don't seem to want to do very much, besides eat
and die. I  can't find a rule-set that lets them, you know, bloom,
without letting the       rocks and everything bloom right along with
them."
     "Yes." He looked thoughtful. "I can see that. It makes a certain
amount   of sense, doesn't it. But who's to say you should have only
one set of  rules?
     Living things, even technogenic ones, behave quite differently
from   inanimate matter. A rock is just a rock; drop it and' it falls.
With a living   thing, that is not necessarily so. Not reliably so."
     "A different physics for life than for nonlife?" I asked, somehow
 vaguely offended by the idea. I must have made a face, too, because he
  laughed.
     "Think of it as a genome, not a physics. Living things carry their
  behavior with them in genetic codes. My genes tell me what to eat,
what  to mate with.
     Possibly they also tell me to avoid places that are too crowded or
too   empty, you see? I don't violate the laws of physics, but neither
do I fall   down like a rock. And neither do I behave as you do, or as
Darren Wallich  does, and my offspring, when I have them, will carry my
genome, not  yours or his."
     Right, okay. That kicked off a whole series of ideas I was eager
to   try, so I thanked Rapisardi and disconnected.
     A genome, yes. A mutable, copyable behavioral standard, the
mycoric  equivalent of a blueprint and an ethical code and a sense and
record of  identity. And of course there were spores, which carried the
genome but  did not actually execute it...
     When my go-to-sleep alarm sounded an hour later, I switched it off
 and kept right on working.
     	The fresh fruit started going bad the next day, and we gorged on
it, as  if determined to be sick of it by the time it left us for good.
The last of  our video mail trickled in as well, and the messages were
· 	viewed by one  and all, over and over again. We needed to be sick of
	that as well, because  there wouldn't be anymore of it until we
	climbed back up into the asteroid  belt again. 		Our text and audio
mail, though, had continued to grow. Far  	from being severed, our
connection to the home worlds seemed to 	grow  stronger every day. And
more trivial, too; for every informative 	article or  well-considered
question, there were a dozen silly, faux- 	personal notes  cluttering
up the stream. It's amazing how quickly 	that stops being  cute and
starts being a waste of your time.
     The 	problem would only get worse, so I initiated a screening
protocol  that would weed out the obvious dribble and send form-letter
	replies  automatically, without our having to so much as look. But
	the remaining  mail and news volume were still formidable, and 	most
of it required at least  cursory examination. 		This was not the
greatest obstacle to our  "interactive" model 	of communication,
though; data rate was. Our outgoing  ration 	had been cut yet again,
and would continue to shrink with ridicu  	lous speed over the next few
days until it bottomed out at only 	seven  hundred bytes per day. Of
which my ration would be a mere twenty-nine.
     		"Popular myth to the contrary," Rapisardi explained gently when
I  complained about this, "mycora do not feed on ambient heat.
     Heat simply means the random vibration of atoms, and harnessing
this is   called 'entropy reversal,' which is actually a physical
impossibility. Now,   forming a chemical bond does release energy,
which the mycora can store for   later use, for example in breaking a
bond elsewhere. The distinction between  chemical and mechanical
processes blurs to almost nil at the nanoscale, so  that energy may be
transferred efficiently, as if through fine springs and  pulleys. And
Brownian motion does facilitate this process, as it facilitates  all
chemistry. But the thermodynamic loss is still significant. There is,
as       I'm sure you have heard, no free lunch.
     "So what is lunch? What do the mycora eat? Once, it was organic
matter,   just as you and I eat organic matter. Now, very often, it is
a combination   of inorganic matter and light, and this is where much
of our problem   originates.
     Many mycora, not most but a good fraction of them, contain a
photon-absorbing molecule called melanophyll which is sensitive to
long-wavelength radiation such as infrared or, in some cases,
microwaves.
     "Unfortunately, our high-gain communications to the Immunity are
in   that very form, and as we descend ever further into the
Mycosystem, this  becomes dangerous. We want not to feed the my-cora,
or arouse them in any  way, so we must emit radiation of much longer
wavelength, meaning radio, and  at a much lower power, meaning about
twenty watts as opposed to several  hundred, and of course, as always,
at an ever longer range. All of which  reduce our data rate. I maintain
that we shouldn't be transmitting anything  at all, but I am overridden
in this. The risks are impossible to  estimate, at least for now.
     So be thankful for your ration, mein friend; if I have my way, it
might   yet shrink to zero."
     Well. I'm sure you'll understand, there's a certain frustration in
  hiring on as a mission correspondent and then not being allowed to
correspond. I was by no means the only victim, though; if anything,
Wallich  was the hardest hit. More than I, more than anyone, he'd made
a habit of  being in both places at once, but in the Immunity · the
increasing time lag  had made an observer of him, and the loss of
visual data had reduced him to  mere nagging, and now, finally, even
that was evaporating. But he gathered  what news he could, requested
small blocks of data when he could, and  otherwise busied himself on
the zee, cautiously tuning and updating the  specifications of our
onboard Immune system, providing maximum advantage  against the latest
human-modified strains.
     "Plus," he noted, "I've found traces of the Gladholder Immune
system  lingering here and there, so I'm going to see if I can wipe 'em
out." Hey,       everyone needs a hobby.
     My own little world was coming along beautifully, thanks to
Rapisardils  suggestions. Let There Be Light, and there was. Let There
Be Genome and  Temperature and Buoyancy, and there were. Let the Spores
of Mycora be Immune  to Gravity, and they were. This last was difficult
to justify, since spores  were little masses every bit as subject to
the laws of physics as anything  else, but I knew little of the
processes that actually did lift them off  planetary surfaces.
"Convection" and "solar wind" were the appropriate  buzzwords, but just
how those would translate into cellular automaton rules  I had no idea.
     Anyway, the real action was in genomes. I had them up to twenty
genes,   now, little data bytes specifying whether a mycorum would
photosynthesize,   whether it could eat rock, whether it could survive
in a vacuum, and more   esoteric things like its programmed lifespan
and its preferred number of  mycoric neighbors. The results, so far,
were remarkably satisfying.
     Hanging out in the wardroom that afternoon, I put some finishing
touches on the model, dropped a spore in, and watched the fireworks.
The  spore, a dark blue dot, fell down through blackness until
encountering the  upper atmosphere of Mulch World, whereupon it woke up
and converted itself  to a real dot, which setded--much more sloMy--to
the planet's surface.
     Instantly, green mulch flared red where the mycorum touched it,
and spores  began to boil out of the wound, some of them firing
straight out into space,  others skittering through the atmosphere,
then germinating and settling  back down again to form new infection
sites.
     The blooms spread, flickered, twitched. Where they reached down to
bare   rock, they stopped, finding the barrier at first impenetrable,
but the   daytime surface of Mulch World was reddening, the patches of
green growing   smaller and smaller in agonized spasms. Technically,
mulch could reproduce,   could bathe in sunlight and slowly convert
rock into biomass, but its growth   rate was so vastly · smaller than
the mycora's that I might as well never   have built in the capability
at all.
     Gradually, the nightside began to succumb as well, sparing only
the   polar caps. Structure began to form on the surface--towers and
fountains and   fields of flowery fruiting bodies. The planet's crust
grew thinner, redder,   and then suddenly it was gone. The last bits of
nonpolar rock vanished, the   mycora a thick, living layer in place of
a crust, lower surface sizzling and   dying against the yellow molten
interior itself, which solidified into new   rock, which was eaten
again, leaving the mycora to be killed again...
     And the growth and flowering of my pocket Mycosystem ground to a
halt,   its underside locking forever into this trivial oscillation
while the upper  strata slowly froze, became static. The polar caps
remained pristine, little       yarmulkes of white against the red and
yellow of the converted planet.
     Crap. Still no dynamic endurance, still no sign of the
bloom-without-end that was the real Mycosystem. Crap, crap. I threw
away the  sim log, archived the rule base, and closed the whole thing
up, suddenly  weary of it. I called up my Philusburg sim instead, and
got to work clearing  away still more of the buildings. Grass! I wanted
lots and lots of green       grass!
     I hadn't gotten very far, though, when an alarm klaxon split
through me  like the end of the world: WONNNNK! WONNNNK! So loud I
didn't recognize it,  so sudden that at first I didn't know what had
happened, .just jerked to  alertness, cursing elaborately. I wiped my
windows, going fully  transparent for the first time in days.
     The lights had gone red.
     Fear shot through me, momentarily paralyzing, and then I was
fumbling at  the latch, popping the cabin door open, hurling myself out
into the  wardroom. After a while, you get to know where the handholds
are. I grabbed  one, swinging my path around toward the bridge, and let
go.
     Grabbed another one as I passed through the hatchway, to keep me
from  flying right into the back of Darren Wallich's chair.
     "What's happening?" I was saying. "What's happening, what's
happening?"
     Every imaginable spacecraft emergency was flashing through my
mind:  Decompression. Fire. Bloom. Life-support failure. This last, for
some  reason, struck a particular note of fear. Was the air too thin?
     Did I detect a hint of odor that shouldn't be there?
     Baucum, who was on station, turned toward me, the look on her face
not  particularly comforting. Not panicked either, though, and I took
at  least a small measure of courage from this.
     "What's up?" Tosca Lehne asked from the hatchway behind me.
     Baucum grimaced. "I've got a confirmed live contact on the hull.
     No evidence of replication yet."
     Live contact. Confirmed. Not a spore, but a solitary live
mycorum.
     Ergo, says the brilliant reporter's mind, we have entered the
Mycosystem. No  evidence of replication, ergo the t-balance is working,
the hull not  dissolving into foam or powder or whatever the hell it
would dissolve into if  mycora were eating it. Into mycora, yes. Baucum
not losing her composure, so  for now the prognosis is good. This is,
after all, expected. And yet,  the alarm had sounded...
     "Take your seats, gentlemen," Wallich said curtly, not bothering
to  face us.
     We complied. "Still just the one contact, Baucum?"
     "Negative, I have a second. Make that three. Spores, this time."
     "Acknowledged. Rapisardi, any sign of contamination in the engine
 nozzles?"
     From the zee: "Nothing yet, Captain."
     And Jenna Davenroy's voice: "I'm closing the covers, sir."
     Sir, Captain. Yes. Easy to forget that, easy to let discipline
grow   lax, the work environment informal. But this was serious
business, wasn't it?
     Deadly serious, a thin metal hull holding in our atmosphere,
holding out  the radiation and vacuum of space, and the pathogens.
There were a million ways to go wrong, and only a handful of ways not
to.
     Okay, these are not exactly profound revelations, I admit it. But
the   obvious does not always hit us on a gut level until that
scharfblick moment   when we look around and really realize our
circumstances. As in, allow them  to become real for us. I'd done a
good job of burying that line of thought,  of conveniently forgetting
that the Mycosystem was more than a sim  geeked up on the zee.
     "Seven confirmed contacts," Baucum said. "Eight."
     Wallich grunted, acknowledging. Then, in a kind of slow,
thoughtful   tone: "Immune system to stage two alert, please. Skin
capacitors and heat   pipes on standby."
     17B "Aye, sir," said Lehne.
     "Finding any problems with the t-balance?"
     "Negative."
     "Still at eight contacts, sir. I think we passed through a cloud
of  them."
     "Right," Wallich said. "Well, we could be at the top of an
upwelling  zone.
     Let me know if you register anything else. That goes double for
you,  Rapsard.
     Strashmm?
     It took me a moment to recognize my own name, another moment to
fall   into the smooth, military precision I saw happening around me.
"Yes,  sir?"
     "Shut down the communication system, please. Power allocation to
zero.
     Transfer it all to Lehne."
     "Yes, sir," I said, and set about complying.
     "That's kye, sir, "he corrected.
     Aye, sir."
     "Lehne? Drop skin temperature ten degrees on the sunward side. I'd
like   you to heat the hull to four hundred kelvins in fifteen seconds,
and not   just where the contacts are registered. Full discharge,
everywhere, and I   don't want skin conductance affected.
     ,lear.
     "Aye," Lehne said, working invisible controls. "Heat pipes
engaged.
     Capacitor safety off. Hull temperature dropping."
     "Clear and pull."
     Lehne nodded. "Clear. Pull. Capacitors discharged."
     The steady red glow of the cabin lights flickered for a moment,
and   then returned as steady as ever.
     "Zero contacts on the hull, sir," Baucum reported. I wasn't the
only   one breathing a sigh of relief. "Excellent. Lehne, how necessary
was   that?"
     A pause, then the breathy harrumphing of Lehne's voice. "Not
necessary, sir.
     Nominal function on t-balance. You don't.., want to mess with the
skin       conditions unless necessary."
     "Right. Well, at least we've got the drill down in case we need
it.
     Well done, people." He sounded brisk, perfunctory, as if he didn't
mind  if we weren't listening. Speaking more to himself than to us.
Trying to   reassure himself. The final responsibility was, after all,
his own.
     From the zee, Rapisardi's voice: "Captain, I read a contact event
on   engine cover one."
     "Contact event on the hull," Baucum added. "Two contacts. Three."
     Wallich paused and harrumphed, himself, before asking, "Lehne,
your  recommendation?"
     "DO nothing."
     "Baucum, Rapisardi? Any objection?"
     "None, sir."
     Neither voice sounded enthusiastic.
     "Davenroy," Wallich said, "I want you ready to open those covers
and   throttle up on about a millisecond's notice. Is that clear?"
     "My finger is resting on the button," Davenroy's voice replied.
     I turned, saw Wallich nodding to me. He looked resigned. "Right.
Well,   we're in it now, aren't we?"
     In it. Yes. It seemed a totally new idea, unthinkable: the
My-cosystem   no longer below us somewhere, but all around, a deep
spherical layer wrapped  around the sun, as real and affecting as ocean
or atmosphere. My mind,  grappling with the concept, reduced it to
cartoon: a translucent Mycosphere,  enormous, its upper boundary
rippling with our penetration, its lower one  far below, the haze of it
obscuring the yellow smiley face of Sol at   the center.
     And 11.0 ourselves? A single pixel plunging down through the
ripples.
     Green, for mulch.
     "You might want to look outside, Baucum said. "Three o'clock high,
 twenty degrees. We have a visitor."
     Oh. Reluctantly, I turned and opened a round exterior window,
anchoring  it to the bulkhead beside me. Where Baucum was pointing,
there hung a...
     smudge? Cloud? No, of course, it was a transient me/gastructure, a
diffuse  bloom of loosely interacting mycora, massing maybe twenty or a
hundred  kilograms smeared across thousands of cubic kilometers of
space. The inner  system was full of these. Probes launched down into
the Mycosystem became  these, blooming and spreading and exploding into
molecule-thin lattices of  technogenic life, less dense than smoke and
yet structurally rigid enough to  hold their fantastic shapes as the
solar wind tumbled them upward.
     For a'while, anyway--nothing lasted long in the Mycosystem.
     Soon, in hours or days or possibly weeks, that smudge would break
apart   into countless quadrillions of individual mycora, or collapse
into a handful   of fruiting bodies and then swell to bursting with
spores.
     "Well, looky there," Wallich said. "Range?"
     "Too far to triangulate optically," Baucum said. "You want an
 active ping?"
     Wallich laughed at that. "No, certainly not."
     The shape grew. I had to realign my thinking; I'd assumed we were
heading in the same direction we were pointing, but of course we
weren't  under power anymore, and our orientation probably had more to
do with   antenna alignment than anything else.
     My breath caught. I was suddenly, keenly aware of the smallness of
the  bridge, of the ship itself. The thinness of the hull, and the
hugeness of the  thing before us. And still the shape was growing,
approaching, threatening  to engulf. Not like the clouds of Earth, or
of Jupiter, or of the cavern  skies of Ganymede. Not amorphous, not
fluid, but iceberg-jagged and yet  somehow springy-looking, soft and
resilient as a sponge, and yet so diffuse  it was barely there at all.
A smearing of the starscape, a haze of  scattered sunlight,
yellow-white against the blackness.
     There was detail to the haze, though--direct gaze made it seem
lumpy,  marbled, while the corners of the eye saw it as spirals and
lattices, shot       through with glints of rainbow color.
     Still growing, now almost the size of my outstretched hand, but
then   suddenly it was shrinking again, moving down and to the right.
We were   passing it.
     Passing it by a wide berth, by hundreds of kilometers. Not even
close   to it, and yet dwarfed.
     "I want a watch officer on duty at all times," Wallich said
softly.
     "With active course schematic and the bulkheads on transparent. If
  anything ...
     visible.., falls anywhere near our path, I'm to be informed
immediately."
     "Fly right through," said Tosca Lehne. "T-balance really does
work.
     You'd never even feel it."
     "Yeah?" Wallich grinned. "Bet your life on it?"
     Well, naturally nobody took him up on that.

     THE TGL GARDEN

     Entered Mycosystem.  Wish yoU were here. Hello? This is your
mother. I  just found out your big trip is to Earth.
     Shame on you, not telling a thing like that/I had to hear it from
 another patient.
     Your letters... Well, I can't make much sense of them, but I'm
certain   the word "Earth" was never mentioned. They say the thought is
what   counts.
     Thinking is important. True terrible. Say hello to the Earth for
me,   all right? and hurry back. Get that thing away from me. Yes, I'm
 finished now.

     Momma, i Will wave @ Earth 4U luv John.

ST HELIER GOV OFFICE: Occurs to me
our  data rate to St Helier about 9X data rate to Jupiter. Can set up a
relay?
     Compressed data stream, not encrypted, public channel OK. You owe
no  favors, but we need an ally. What say?
     atttention John Strasheim, Immune Ship Louis Pasteur Communications
  Officer: I've brought your request up with Governor and received
grudging   permission to comply. Monies are owed already, he
remonstrates. Very glad to  hear you survived Mycosystem entry. I admit
I had my doubts,t Further   communications to me may be indexed
&CHDBSH8091
     ,for faster routing. Relay queue messages should be indexed &W=
G&XXXXSH8094.
     Further requests are likely to be denied, but I and my devil
microscopic helpers will do what we can. Wishing you best fortune down
there.

     &CHDBSH8091 Thanks.

     &W= G&XXXXSH8094 Hallo Immunity via Gladhold Treacherous spaces
above   and below, many spores, but we survive, a bubble of ;mmunity in
the warm and  bright. Mycosystem is a visible thing--enclosed please
find "stroke vector"  sketch of transient megastructure. More and more
of these, and the sun so       close,t Next stop Mars, about which more
later.
     "I think I'm ready to learn about t-balance," I said to Tosca
Lehne as   we sat alone together on the invisible bridge. Bloom watch:
walls blanked on   the zee, replaced with starscape. A black disc
eclipsing the body of Sol,  leaving the corona shining around it,
brighter than the entire sun as seen  from Jupiter. Unreal. Nothing was
real but our own two selves, bent  weightlessly into invisible chairs,
the pressure of strap and cushion the  only sign of Louis Pasteur
holding out the infinite emptiness. For me,  anyway--Lehne himself was
on instrument duty, with probably no outside  view at all.
     "Yeah?" Lehne yeahed, looking askance at me. "Sudden interest?"
     I shook my head. "Not sudden, no. Convenient. I've needed to know,
and   here we both are with time on our hands. Since I have to squeeze
our entire  experience down to single paragraphs, I want to be sure I'm
even more aware  of the details than before. It's ... important to know
the totality whose       essence I'm trying to capture, you see?"
     "T-balance is a detail?"
     "You know what I mean."
     He pursed his lips reproachfully. "Not a detail, Strasheim. This
mission wasn't conceived until Wallich read my second paper. I am the
inventor of my own prison."
     "Shiptime:" I quoted, "jail, with the possibility of suffocation."
  "Right," Lehne said, unsmiling. "You're not happy about being here."
     "No. You may think you volunteered, but I don't think I did. No
one   else available. Indispensability as the chief condition of our
lives. Busy,   always busy, and no one there to pick up the slack.
That's life, eh? That's   life in the Immunity."
     "You don't enjoy your work, then?"
     "No, I do."
     "But you wish you had more help? Some assistants? I'm not clear on
what       you're trying to say."
     Lehne shrugged, looking resigned to his tension. "Wishing the
fate of   the future didn't rest so heavily on every set of shoulders.
Clearer?
     Lottick asked me to go on the mission, and I told him I would. But
he  wasn't telling all he knew, and that frightened me. Still does, and
now  there's spy bugs in the allocation console, and traces of
Gladholder Immune  system lingering in the air and food that Wallich
can't seem to get rid  of."
     Having no response to that, I switched topics and prompted: "You
were   going to tell me about t-balance."
     He turned, faced me fully. The corona's glare reflected from his
zee-spec lenses, pink and yellow navigation lines crisscrossing the
starscape   behind him. A frail, angry human, soaring alone through
empty space.
     "Heavy metals," he said, "forced into organic-like nanostructure.
     Electrophoresis, epitaxy, shock cooling so the atoms never get a
chance   to displace. Very difficult to manufacture, but it looks like
TGL to the   TGL, even though really it's heavy metals. Knowing it was
toxic, they'd   dismantle, form cysts around the fragments, use them
for nucleation anchors.
     A platform to grow from, permanent because unusable for any other
purpose.
     But they don't know. Don't have the means to figure it out.
Electron holes  here and here and here, they see, and they know it must
be a piece of mature  my-costructure, neue erbauen verboten, so they
stay away. Mycosystem has  Immune responses of its own, but you can
trick it at its roots, tell it you       are an Immune response."
     "A sort of Trojan horse approach, then?"
     "More than that," he said. "A horse made of eighty trillion Trojan
  soldiers, sticking their arms out and saying, 'Hi, I'm Trojan like
you.
     Everything is fine, but for God's sake back off before you screw
something up.'" "Huh. And the Trojans buy this?"
     Lehne shrugged. "So far. Maybe not forever. Geek a sim, it only
tells   so much. Trojans get angry, though, they'll be choking on
actinides, dying   and dying until they finally break through.
Meanwhile we fight   back--chemicals, vacuum phages, heat pipes ...
Makes them angrier, of course.
     Hope for a shadow to hide in, out of the surgight. Cool off,
freeze them out.
     If not, hope they can live without you up in the Immunity, because
they'll  have to." I grimaced.
     "Ah, yes. The ever-present risk of death." "Always."
     "Did you ever guess you'd be in this sruanon.
     "This? For once, Lehne cracked a smile. "Your basic Balkan farmboy
  doesn't expect to leave home. Having left, for Jupiter no less, he
doesn't   expect to return. No, the Balkan farmboy lives in perpetual
amazement at his  surroundings, at his fate. How did this happen? I
have a son, did I tell  you that?"
     "No," I said, interested.
     He nodded, starlight and cartoon lines trailing through his hair.
"Two   years old next month. His mom runs the skylights at Anshar-ton.
I miss   both."
     "I should think so!"
     "I'll sit my son down someday, tell him: don't get too
comfortable,  boy.
     Don't get too sure. One day you'll wake up surprised, and never
the   same after that."
     "Damn," I said, looking down suddenly.
     "What? Trans-meg incoming?"
     "Two," I said, watching them grow, measuring them against the
navigation marks. M^RS, a fat red arrow said, pointing out a faint red
dot.
     The trans-megs, already thumb-sized, seemed to fire directly at us
from a   point just ahead of the planet in its dotted-line orbit. But
as I watched  and measured, I saw that they would miss us, that both
structures would sail  by hundreds of kilometers beneath my unsupported
feet.
     "Accurate?" Lehne asked mildly.
     "Nah, they'll miss. But they give me the willies .just the same."
 "Imagine that."
     "Lehne doesn't seem too happy," I told Renata Baucum later that
day.
     She was working on one of the wardroom's fold-out exercise
machines, a  confusion of pulleys and cables and stretchy rubber
tubing, and  wearingincongruously--the green "body wrap" dress she'd
picked up in Saint  Helier. Its lower corners kept creeping up,
weightless, but friction and  concealed pins held the garment together,
revealing her calves and nothing  more. Sweat had begun to glisten
there, and on her brow and shoulders and       around the edges of her
zee-spec lenses.
     "You know anyone who is?" she said back. Pull, twist, release.
Pull,   twist, release.
     No, I thought, I don't. But what I said was, "I'm glad he's with
    us. He seems to know what he's about."
     "You know anyone who doesn't?"
     "What I mean is, he seems very aware of the capabilities and
limitations of t-balance. We can fly right through a trans-meg, he
says, and  that makes me feel better, because we passed nine of them on
my watch today.
     Tomorrow it may be twenty, or fifty, or a thousand, and sometime
it may not  be possible to avoid them all. We're moving pretty fast."
     "Personally," Baucum said, "I'd like a closer look with the
instruments.
     Nobody really knows what the trans-megs do, what they're for.
Their  computational capacity has got to be staggering, and they
interact with each  other in peculiar ways. Sometimes they luff and
tack like sails, riding the  solar wind until they collide. That
wouldn't occur by chance, not as  often as it's been observed."
     I frowned. I'd seen a couple of the structures quiver and quake as
they       sailed by, as if they were about to fly apart at the sight
of us.
     But they hadn't flown apart, and couldn't really see us. Right?
"You   think they're intelligent?"
     "I think they're alive, yes. I know they are, and in terms of the
 number of subunits and the linkage between them, the complexity is
comparable  to ours, to any higher animal's. But for all that, they're
just components  in a larger system."
     "I always figured they were just goop," I said.
     "Yeah. So is hemoglobin."
     Pull, twist, release. Pull, twist, release.
     "I 'wonder if the Gladholders have any information about it. Maybe
I   should ask Dibrin."
     She sniffed. "A bureaucrat. Possibly a saboteur bureaucrat." "Come
  on--he's our friend." "We barely met him."
     Suddenly, I was angry. "So what? What difference does that make?
I'm   sick to death of this idea that friendship is work, that it's
some grand   project that comes together over months or years or
decades. Knowing someone  for a long time doesn't mean you're their
friend, and meeting someone for  the first time doesn't mean you
aren't. Everything is work for us.
     Everything is a process.
     We're a sad, sick, demented people, you know that? We could stand
to       improve."
     Baucum stopped pulling on the ropes. "I didn't mean anything. I
didn't   intend to... upset..." She seemed at a loss, wholly unprepared
for my   outburst.
     "Talk to Dibrin, sure, if you think it'll help."
     "Why wouldn't it?" I went on, more gently but still riding the
scharfblick channel, the sudden realtime stream of self-awareness,
neither  welcome nor especially resisted. "Where's the harm? We've
built ourselves  into a state of perpetual crisis where every action
has to be weighed and  justified. It excuses a lot, excuses us from
having to be happy, from having  to wonder why we aren't. God, how we
trivialize that! What a low priority we  assign it! Happiness is a vice
to us, a guilty indulgence we save up for,  pay for afterward, keep to
ourselves like a dirty secret."
     I took my zee-spec off, waved it at her. "I have idealized virtual
 environments on this thing. Does that shock you? I don't care! When I
get  back, I'm going to tell everyone to spend an evening playing
around in  virtual reality. Just so they'll know. Just so they'll know,
for once in  their lives, what it's like to feel free, unencumbered, to
be met with  unconditional acceptance and yes, even love. And. there's
a problem for you,  isn't there? Who has the energy for that? It's like
we've inverted the whole  point of living, placed risk reduction ahead
of the very things we're trying  not to risk. But we're still going to
die, aren't we? Childless, overworked,       unaware of the wider
universe and without even love to soothe the pain.
     Especially without love. I always thought Tosca Lehne was a bit of
a   social cripple, but he has a wife and family. Did you know? He's
unhappy now   because he had to leave them, but when he gets back..."
     I paused, studied Baucum's shocked expression. Well, good, let her
be  shocked. The outburst surprised me as well, but it felt good,
liberating, to  slip in past her defenses, right past her wit and verve
and self-control to       touch some inner surface she didn't want to
admit was there.
     "We're all such cowards," I said quietly, "afraid to die, afraid
to   slow down, afraid to reach for the person beside us and say 'I
love you.'   It's pathetic."
     "John," Baucum murmured, "you surprise me. I didn't know."
     And then suddenly she was off the exercise seat and drifting into
my   arms, grasping, holding, pressing her lips against me, and I
wanted to   protest: no, stop, that wasn't what I meant! But then I
wasn't so sure, and  then my cabin door was open and we were tumbling
inside, and then...
     You know what happened then.
     %, Later, what seemed like a long time later, we drifted together
in  warm darkness. Feeling good, feeling languidly and luxuriously
alive. This   was a thing worth protecting.
     "I had no idea there was such a passionate man in there," Bau-cum
 whispered, tapping me on the chest.
     The admission surprised. Not passionate? I? I, who spent the wee
hours  prowling for news, forgoing food and sleep in the ongoing effort
to bring  people closer together? Who took the trouble to cajole and
query actual   human beings at every turn, to sniffout each story's
emotional crux? Who had   agreed to this stinking mission for almost no
reason at all, for nothing more   than ambition and vanity and pure
love of the chase?
     "I thought I knew just how you were going to be," she went on,
"servant   of the status quo, asking everyone how proud we were to be
working for the   right side. I think you were supposed to be that way,
expected to, I mean,   but you know, people are hard to model. In
closed environments, all sorts of   buried traits come to the fore that
nobody's ever seen or anticipated."
     "And hidden assets," I whispered, fondling.
     She giggled. "And those, yes. I didn't realize how much I ... how
 much...
     It's been a long time."
     "For most of us, I think. I keep saying it's a health issue. Have
I   told you about 'Boffa Stranger' day?"
     "Stranger?" she said, pushing at me playfully. "Weren't you just
the   one preaching instant friendship?"
     "Well, you seem friendly enough."
     "Humph."
     We drifted in silence for a while. Baucum's mock indignation was
fine,   it was fun, but I did still feel some sting in the idea that
she'd thought me   a shill or puppet of the system. And passionless!
Was the error hers, or   did I really come across that way? She was the
aloof insider, after all; I   was just here to tell the tale.
     "I'm not receiving instructions, you know," I finally told her.
"Doing   my thing, I've caused my share of trouble over the years. I
doubt my   involvement would have been encouraged, or even allowed, if
there were really  all these ugly secrets lying around."
     "Hmm. Unless the invitation was given specifically to throw off
suspicion."
     "Suspicion of what?' "I don't know. But if something's going on
back  home, you're pretty well out of the way of it, wouldn't you say?"
     I snorted. "What is it with you, Renata? There's plenty to worry
about   down here without making stuff up. You should learn to unwind a
  little."
     "I thought I just did!"
     Our skins are ignorant, blushing even in darkness. But you can
feel the  heat.
     "You know what I mean," I said.
     "I know what you mean," she agreed. We brushed against a wall,
drifted   away again. "Would it surprise you to learn I keep idealized
environments   too? Not just here on the ship, but for years. A dirty
secret, like you said.
     I'm telling you this in confidence."
     "Your secrets are safe. And yes, I am surprised. Can you flash one
to me?"
     She giggled again. "I have a better idea, berichter: trade
zee-specs   with me."
     The request gave me pause. Trade zee-specs? It seemed a shocking
intimacy, more so than what had happened already. Some things were not
for   sharing! But I felt her arms moving behind me, working symbols
and windows,  and then the zee-spec was lifting off her face and ixt
seemed like she was  smiling and there really was no good way to
refuse. I opened up  Ex-Philusburg, now simply a meadow-floored cavern
some three kilometers  across, with ersatz blue sky shining above, then
removed the zee-spec and  handed it over, accepting hers in return.
     It was warm, and smelled of her. The view through the lenses dark
at   first, and then a smear of meaningless colors as it settled into
place, and   then finally an image snapping sharply into focus as the
beams locked  onto my pupils.
     I gasped.
     Red sandstone beneath my feet, the sky above an azure blue, deep
and   clear and impossibly distant, wholly unlike the cavern lights of
home. The   horizon shimmered with rainbow color, pillars and streamers
of living fog   fading up into the blue of atmosphere, while all around
was an eye of yellow  in a riotous field of whites and blues and
purples.
     Momentarily overwhelmed, I struggled to make sense of this, to
gauge   the distances, to interpret the shapes. I stood on a pillar of
rock, maybe   three meters across and ten times as high. More properly,
I hovered--my body   hung weightless and nude, bare feet brushing air
several centimeters above   the rock. Below, all around, stood
truck-sized huts of yellow fiber, rising   out of a rippled yellow
surface that looked like wet rubber. Fires smoked   from little
stone-lined pits. Doorways beckoned. And in the distance...
     Not fields, not forests, not jungles or deserts, but.., something
else.
     Something clearly alive, breathing, pulsing, moving in organic
fits and  spasms. Not one thing, not even a million things, but an
infinity of  them--mounds upon mounds, branches upon branches, flowers
upon flowers upon  flowers ... And things more disturbing than that,
things like eyes and   mouths and tentacles, like slimy pools filled
with wriggling forms, like   bristly brain-coral reefs sprouting fish,
snakes, monsters, from penile  stalks of quivering meat. Suggestions of
form, only, like animal shapes  glimpsed in cloud.
     Solid? Gelid? Formed only of slime or vapor or evil intention?
     Visually, there was no way to tell, though some of the forms
reached kilometers high.
     Even clouds look solid from a distance.
     Clouds, yes. To my right, the sky roiled and billowed, white and
silver   and gray, dark gray in places on the bottom. A thrill of
terror from my   youth: storm clouds. Water vapor? Myco-vapor? A
million million spores  blowing in on the jet stream, waiting for a
downdraft to carry them,  blooming, to Earth?
     That was where I was, of course: Earth. Not my Earth, humanity's
Earth,   but the one that came after. The one we'd fled in horror so
great it had   shaped everything about us from that day forward.
     "Jesus," I said, every hair on my body standing straight out.
Baucum   was right there with me, zee-spec configured to incorporate
her into the  simulation, her nude body tangled with mine, drifting
with mine above the  rock spire. She was wearing my zee-spec, looking
blind, not seeing me or the       horror around me, but rather the
peaceful meadow of Ex-Philusburg.
     · 	"You're mvlsme, she laughed.
     "Baucum, are you insane?"
     "No, really, I can't see you."
     I looked around me, trying not to shudder or grimace or scream.
"This   is your ideal environment?"
     Lightning flared from the clouds, crashed into distant spires of
purple-rainbow fog. Answering flashes raced across the ground,
skittering  over the landscape, and through it, vanishing one by one
over the jagged       horizon.
     "Oh," she said, smiling blindly at me, "it is a bit of a shock, I
 suppose.
     The end-product of several years' geekwork. Ideal? Not so much
that as       coveted. I told you, I want the Earth back. As much as
you do."
     "More," I said, cringing. "You win. You want it more."
     "You're so tense. I wish I could see you," she said. Then, in a
surprisingly keen imitation of Chris Dibrin's voice: "May I ...
meddle?"
     "What? Yeah, fine. Go ahead."
     Her fingers danced in empty air for a while. Finally, her eyes
rested  on me.
     "Tsk. You look so horrified."
     "I'd rather watch surgery. Really, can I turn this sim off?"
     She looked hurt. "I wanted to impress you. Yes, go ahead and close
it.
     There's another file in there, called 'Waterfall.'" "Take my word
for  it," I told her, "I'm impressed. The attention to detail is...
     impressive. Very."
     I would have nightmares for a week, a month, the rest of my life,
now   that I knew what Hell must look like. I wiped the image, found
the layer of   controls and windows beneath it. Breathed a sigh of
relief. Zee-specs are  mostly all the same, but the defaults and
preferences and menu and image  layouts must be as unique and
individual as the people who own them.
     Baucum's controls were not like mine, but they were obvious
enough. I found  and activated the "Waterfall" sim, which sprang to
life around me.
     Again, I floated. Again, the sky above me was deep blue, with
cumulus   islands rolling across it, puffy white. This time, though,
the jungle was  green, terrestrial, safe. Sprinkled liberally with
flowers, yes, but real  ones, biogenic ones, evolved over billions of
years like God intended. The  surface beneath my feet was a pool of
water wider than a house, churned by a  cascade of water tumbling down
black-rocky cliffs. The sight and sound of it  soothed me instantly,
ointment on the bruises of my soul.
     Faint music played, barely audible, seeming to originate from
somewhere   higher up on the cliff.
     "Is that better?" Baucum asked, eyeing me from arm's length.
     "Yes," I told her. "Much. I thought my Mycosystem sim was bad."
     "Oh, are you still working on that?"
     "Yeah, sort of. I can't get the dynamics right, though. Not like
yours!"
     "Well, mine is a top-down fractal animation, not a cellular
automaton'.
     Very little of the underlying physics is actually modeled.
     The mycostructure is pure marshmallow, no internal chemistry."
"Well,   it's effective. It's horrible."
     "I do apologize for that. With long exposure we get inured to
things,   forget the shock value of them, but I suppose not everyone
can gaze   unflinching into the face of the Mycosystem."
     "Yeah, well, I picked a hell of a place to spend the winter, then,
  didn't I?"
     "So it would appear," she said, and smiled.
     I looked her up and down, then, relaxing tensed muscles, enjoying
the  zee-spec's interpretation of what she would look like if the
lights were on       and the lenses clear. Pink nipples, auburn pubic
hair, smooth soft   hips...
     God, it had been a long time. The best things in life, we used to
say,   are free. So why did I have the feeling there'd be hell to pay?
Ah, well,   payment would be rendered in due time. This was hardly the
moment to  worry about it.
     Baucum was tender as well as beautiful, understanding as well as
skeptical. When we'd fallen together it had been with grace,
enthusiasm,  the gentle brushing aside of a deep mutual cowardice.
Who'd have guessed?
     And now, to see her...
     "I'm very impressed," I informed her, and was rewarded with
another  blush.
     "Cut it out, you," she said, and pulled me close to stop my
looking.
     And then kissed me, to quash my reply. And then...
     Well, you know what happened then.

     SEVENTEEN
     MARS, THE GOD OF . . .


     The rapping on my cabin door was gentle but firm, clearly intended
to   wake me, but discreetly. Grunting, I hit the lights, took my
zee-spec off   the charging rack, swore when I saw the time. I popped
the door open.
     Darren Wallich floated outside, trying hard to look polite and
  apologetic through the grin he was failing to suppress.
     I glared. "Yes?"
     "Sorry to disturb you," he said, "but we needed a word in private.
You   know what this is about."
     Pause. "Yeah." Baucum's scent was still strong on my skin. "None
of my  business," he hastened to say, holding up both hands to indicate
his  helplessness, "but it's not a large ship. Privacy does not come
cheap."
     "Right."
     "I can't tell you your business."
     "Right," I said, more slowly. He was still smirking, still
fighting       it, still failing. Nice to know my life was so amusing.
     "Morale never stops being an issue, Strasheim. You appreciate thgt
for  every crewman who finds someone to... cohabitate with, there are
three or  four who don't? We seem to have a fairly polite group this
time around, but  even when open rivalries don't result--" "It won't
happen again, sir."
     He looked me over, the smirk faltering a little, guilt and
sympathy  struggling to take its place. "I have no jurisdiction over
your personal       life. I have no interest in meddling, particularly
in affairs of the heart.
     My concern is purely for the mission."
     "It won't happen again," I repeated, letting more of the
irritation  creep into my voice. I'd known this was coming; despite our
efforts to be  quiet, I didn't for a moment suspect we'd fooled anyone.
But I didn't have  to like it.
     Wallich reached out and gripped my arm, a surprisingly warm and
masculine gesture. I understand, friend, and approve, and envy your
luck.
     But do the right thing. I sniffed, and finally nodded my
understanding.
     "Baucum?"
     "Already talked to her. I think she likes you."
     I colored. "Thanks. I'd guessed."
     "More than she wants to, I mean. She seems offguard and flustered.
     For whatever that's worth."
     I could think of no reply.
     Wailich laughed. "All right. I'm glad we had this talk,
Strasheim.
     That famed expressiveness! Sorry, again, to wake you like this,
but I  need you on shift an hour early anyway. We have maneuvers coming
up."
     "Mars?"
     "The one and only. Starts getting real from this point. No time
for   error. Do you need a shower to wake up?"
     I thought about it. "Yeah, probably. Thirty minutes?"
     "You have fifteen," he said, and laughed as if this were the
funniest   thing he'd heard all night.
     "Hi," I said to Baucum as I took my seat.
     "Hi," she returned without meeting my eyes. "Everything all
right?"  "Yep.
     Busy, though."
     It wasn't long before I discovered what she meant.
     The corridor for our Mars approach was narrow, requiring fanatic
precision in both time and space, and for days ahead of time we had a
series  of burns scheduled to keep us locked on an ever-tightening
course. How  exactly a ship like ours could get off course I didn't
fully understand, but  it had to do with things like the resolution of
our position and velocity   measurements, which got worse the farther
we drew from charted celestial  objects, and was now improving steadily
as we approached Mars.
     Here is how fast we were going: at three days out, the planet had
been   a speck under normal magnification. At two days, it was still a
speck. At   one day, it would still be a speck. We'd have slowed down a
lot by then,   sure, but by the time the planet had grown to the size
of an eyeball, we'd be   only an hour from our closest approach; from
there on it would swell   alarmingly, like a balloon about to burst,
like a fist about to strike,  until it filled half the sky, and then
we'd be past it, and an hour after  that it would be the size of an
eyeball again.
     Wallich had walked me through the whole sequence, to be sure I
understood.
     Probably to be sure I wouldn't be surprised or panicky when it
happened.
     That was under normal magnification, though. Under 1000X, the Red
 Planet was already showing off a lot of detail. Formerly red, I should
 say--even from this distance, the thumbnail-sized crescent looked
decidedly  pink, with scattered hints of yellow and purple. That made
it seem real,  somehow, not an image but a place, backlit, altered and
perilous and  directly in our path.
     The polar caps stood out clearly, not so much white as pale
orange,   water and CO2 ices scattered with whatever remained of the
planet's  primordial oxide dust.
     Safe havens. For all its menace, altered Mars was still the safest
  place in the inner system, safer by far than the space surrounding
it. In  space, there was no hiding from the endless sunlight.
     You could cover it up with data windows, though; Wallich kept
asking me   not only for realtime allocation data but for various sorts
of predictions,   and finally I was forced to open a graph table and
geek up some primitive   sims just to stay ahead of him. Even so, he
had me busy working the   numbers.
     "Strasheim: projected datastream for the attitude control system
if we   fire the main engine in five minutes>" "Well, somewhere between
five and  eight kilobits per, depending on what Lehne is doing. Sir."
     What Lehne was doing created no small uncertainty in my
calculations.
     Baucum was detecting an increasing assortment of spores and other
nasties on the hull and in the space ahead, and while no direct action
was  ever taken as a result, Lehne kept the countermeasures hot,
continually  forcing changes in the allocation of power and data. The
ship's autonomous  inclination was to set resources at the level of
Lehne's most outrageous  demand, and to back off from this very slowly
when pressed by other needs,  which would have made sense if we were
actually fighting off a bloom. But  Wallich's was the station most in
need, a situation the ship's computers  didn't seem to want to believe,
and every time I let my attention  wander--easy enough with my chair
hanging almost directly above Renata  Baucum's--I'd soon find his
Reproachful Captain tones dragging me back.
     No wonder he'd wanted a live person at my station!
     The first maneuver, an hour-long burn designed to slip us onto the
  approach corridor by reducing our velocity, came and went. In its
wake came a   number of trips to the wardroom to stretch and exercise a
bit, trips to the   head for the obvious reason, and to the galley to
grab a few portable  calories for the next big push. Since the last of
the fruit, a pair of  suspiciously soft and bruisy-looking melons, had
been consigned to the  recycler two days before, the clear favorites
today were figure-eight  "crumpels" of chewy Gladholder bread, and
squeeze bulbs of the powdered  electrolyte drink called "Tez," which
was apparently some sort of brand  name. How quaint.
     So for half an hour or so, the bridge seemed more like an
easygoing,  zero-gravity caffi, and by agreement we all opened a window
on the engine       room and anchored it to the aft bulkhead,
completely covering the   hatchway.
     Thus, the ship became a single virtual space, losing some fifty
percent   of its length and yet somehow seeming a good deal roomier. Or
maybe it was   just the variety of it that appealed.
     I gather the perspective looked a lot less convincing from the
other   side; Davenroy and Rapisardi kept eyeing us and shaking their
heads. Their   dark rectangular niche was a lot smaller than the
bridge, though, less busy   and colorful, and they did seem to enjoy
the sense of space and the   proximity to someone besides each other.
     Baucum kept up her hull sweeps, and Lehne kept updating his
countermeasure preparations, but since the engine covers were closed
this was  no longer such a big deal, which of course made my job go
away almost  completely.
     Wallich was also looking happier, his demanding side buried once
more,  replaced with smiles and ready laughter.
     "I had a saddleneck team working under me once," he was saying, in
  response to some comment of Davenroy's, "swapping out the plumbing
and wiring  on one of the labs we couldn't afford to shut down at the
time. Always   underfoot, always pulling up the floor plates and
shutting breakers off  without warning anybody. And of course they were
saying the same things  about us, and if there's anyone in the worlds
with zero awe for Immune  science, those were the guys. Gotta love 'em,
you've just gotta. Anyway, one  of these guys:actually, it might have
been a female, but one of them cut off  the water drip to a zeolyte
feed operation we'd been running all week, and I  started, you know,
chewing her out about it, so she just kind of looks at me  and says,
'What, like it isn't wet enough already?'" 	Infectious, his  laughter
rippled through us all.
     	· 	"Was that before or after you got the tickle capacitor.
     asked.
     "Oh, years before," he said seriously, eyeing my upside-down face,
and   then burst out laughing even harder. "I threw such a tantrum
they.., they   put me on an Io orbital survey for five weeks. Which
turned out to be a good   thing, overall, but to this day I train the
labbers to do their own re-mod.
     The shit's all snap-and-go any-wa3 right?"
     We laughed some more, finished our bread, finished our drinks. I
talked   to Baucum a little, but she seemed edgy, embarrassed,
reluctant to look up   at me or respond to me unless pressed. Best to
wait until a better semblance   of privacy prevailed.
     The second burn approached. Work began to pick up again, Darren
Wallich to get edgy.
     "Rapisardi," he said, turning to face the false engine room,
"how's the       payload doing? You ready to drop some probes?"
     "Tube one is powered up," Rapisardi affirmed. "I'll start running
     diagnostics once the burn is complete."
     "That long?"
     Rapisardi clucked. "Unless you don't want me monitoring for
contamination when Davenroy opens the engine covers, yes." "Hmm."
     Baucum's voice cut through: "Hold it, whoa! I just read a
high-frequency radio pulse from the direction of the planet!"
     Radio pulse? Mycora didn't emit radio. Mycora ate radio signals.
What   could be emitting, way the hell down here? Nothing, I thought.
Nothing that   could survive the trip.
     "There goes another!" Baucum said, sounding delighted. Here was
something unexpected, finally, something worthy of her analysis. "The
source   appears to be about half a degree off the limb of the planet."
     "Orbital?" Wallich asked. He was loosening his straps, leaning
forward   in his chair.
     Baucum shrugged. "Offthe surface, anyway. I can't get a Doppler
velocity fix without knowing the source frequency, and I can't measure
range  without a precise transmission time. The source is definitely
outside the  Martian atmosphere, though, at least twenty thousand
kilometers.
     Possibly a lot more.
     I'm reading a third pulse. Lots of echoes!"
     "Are you recording?"
     "Oh, that's affirmative," Baucum said, her fingers dancing in the
air   and on her panel. "Sudhir and I have got to analyze this! It's
not often we   get an active radar ping so close to an infected planet.
As in 'never.' In  the echoes I'm seeing ... several dense bodies out
there, which is  definitely not expected. A lot of diffuse
mycostructure as well, much  more than visual scans would indicate."
     Several of us grumbled at this news. The empty space we were
flying   through was maybe not so empty?
     "It's got to be a human artifact," Wallich said, sounding as
though he   were trying to convince himself of the fact.
     "Here's a fourth ping," Baucum announced, ignoring the comment.
"The   waveform has smeared--something happening at the source. I'm
detecting a  bloom."
     	"Spectral analysis?"
     She frowned, fussed with invisible symbols. "Planetary backscatter
  shows a high concentration of metals, mostly aluminum and iron.
Direct solar  absorption is less conclusive. I would guess that we're
looking at a class  one blossom infest; many thousands of spores,
triggered by the radio  transmission and blooming more or less
simultaneously. Yes, the object  certainly was man-made. Probably
around seven kilos, based on the growth       pattern of the bloom."
     	I! 		"Point to it," Wallich said. 			By agreement, we'd all
pasted a  500X magnification Mars window over the bridge's forward
bulkhead, and  Baucum now undid 	her straps, reached forward over
her console, and laid a  finger on the image. "There." 			I looked, saw
nothing at first but the  meter-wide crescent of the 	:: 	planet,
upturned like a pair of sinister,  bruise-colored horns curving 		away
from the flaming ball of the sun below.
     The curve's lower edge 		was jagged and rainbow-hazy, fading into
wispy  tendrils that 		reached well out into space. Infected Mars. Then
I saw it: a tiny smudge, blue and green and ghostly looking, about
the size of a rice  		grain, hovering off the tip of one horn.
"Man-made object go bang,"  Wailich muttered, snorting to himself.
Then, more loudly: "So what the hell  was it doing down here?
     How did it penetrate the Mycosystem so deeply without blooming a
long time ago?"
     "T-balance?" Tosca Lehne offered.
     I cleared my throat. "Sir, could it be from Mars? Could there be
humans       living here, as well?"
     "Not enough atmosphere," Wallich said, dismissing the suggestion.
     "Somebody sent that thing down here, and unless there's some huge
coincidence operating, or unless there are thousands of them and they
go off  all the time, I'd say its transmissions were somehow in
response to our   arrival.
     Definitely."
     "Someone's been tracking us right along," Davenroy called out from
the   false engine room.
     Wallich nodded. "Right. We're possibly not the only ones seeding
the  MYCosystem with detectors. But who the hell is detecting us, and
why?
     This is a pretty sophisticated operation."
     No one had an answer for him.
     "Okay," he said, leaning back in his seat, retightening the
straps.
     "Okay.
     We're in motion, here, and it's safe to assume the pinger was,
too.
     Let's track the bloom's position optically, maybe compare it to
angular   positions on the radar pings themselves. Throw in frequency
shifts, assuming   they're due to Doppler, throw in the signal arrival
times, and let's see if  we can't trace back a course for this thing.
Where did it come from? Where  was it going?"
     "No guarantee of equal spacing on the transmissions," Lehne
pointed  out.
     "Okay, fair enough. We'll leave that as an unknown. We have got
several       additional solid echoes, though, and I want trajectories
on those as  well."
     He touched Lehne and Baucum each on the shoulder. "Can you two
handle   the problem while the rest of us work the trim burn?"
     "Yes," Lehne said.
     Baucum nodded her agreement. "If we run all the unknowns through a
 million-trial randomization, we should be able to narrow in on a
family of  solutions. From there it should be mostly common sense. I
figure, what,   about half an hour?"
     Lehne shrugged, noncommital but apparently more or less in
agreement.
     "Okay," Wallich said, "do it."
     I felt a stab of envy then, because bioanalysis and
countermeasures   were certainly not superfluous tasks at this point.
Far from it. Wallich had  pulled them off normal duty simply because
they were competent to solve this  new problem, as indeed the whole
crew probably was. Scientists and  technicians and spacers all, all
except for me. But I thought of Tug   Jinacio, with his easy manner and
his concrete, literal way of speaking, and   doubted that he'd have
known much about mathematics or technobiology or space  navigation,
either. Unless we somehow had blooms to fight, his job would  have been
really superfluous, all day, every day. I found the idea   oddly
cheering.
     So the rest of us continued running calculations for the upcoming
burn,   and when it finally arrived it might almost have been just
another smooth   step in the preparations. Only the weight and
vibration made it real. It  lasted forty-five minutes, and when it was
done we were stil/working the   numbers for another five or ten
minutes, gauging the effectiveness of  what we'd done.
     Whee. Eventually, though, Baucum presented the results of the
radar  analysis.
     "Slave your zee-specs to mine, please," she said, whipping into a
 graphical presentation that cast colored lines all over the forward
Mars  display.
     She pointed to an arc. "This is the most likely path for our
friend, Mr.
     Radar Beacon. White denotes its existence as a solid object, while
the  pink is its continuation along the same trajectory as a class one
free-floating bloom. Note that there's another white line crossing
here, possibly indicating the device's point of origin."
     The display flashed, lines vanishing and being replaced one by
one.
     "Lehne's hypothesis is that this object here, with a radar
cross-section   comparable to that of a large instrument probe, is
responsible for launching  these other three objects, whose profiles
are a good deal smaller. Possibly,  these are additional radar beacons.
And here, here, and here, we see other   probelike signatures, with
some fainter echoes that may indicate they've  launched some beacons as
well. It's very speculative, and I'm not sure I  agree, but I haven't
got a counterhypothesis I'm any happier with."
     "It's quite a welcoming party," Rapisardi observed.
     Wallich grunted. "It's very strange. Strasheim, contact the
Gladholders   and see if you can't find some information about this,
right? 'They may be  running some sort of experiment down here, though
you'd think they'd have       warned us, given that they knew where we
were going."
     "The Gladholds aren't a single society," I reminded him.
     "Yeah, well, whatever. Call them anyway. I'm going off shift in a
few       minutes, and so is Davenroy. Eight-four sleep cycle until
further notice.
     Rapisardi, we drop first payload in eleven hours. I want all
diagnostics run at least twice before that happens, and I want you to
wake me  if you find any anomalies. It's a critical phase, not a time
to find a  weasel in our shorts."
     "We have access to the payload software from here," Rapisardi said
with   an edge of annoyance. "Running the full diagnostic sequence
twice is a   terrific waste of my time. If anything is wrong, I simply
need a minute to  fix it and another minute to test the fix in
simulation. And I hasten to  assure you, nothing is wrong."
     Wallich darkened. "Yeah, well, this isn't a good time to go
mucking with the guts of the mission, either. Just bear with me, all
right?"
     "Certainly;" came the reply, and if the word was not delivered
with   complete sincerity, well, Wallich didn't seem overly bothered.
     Dibrin: please translate and forward to appropriate net channels.
Hallo       Gladholds. Pasteur encountering radar beacons etc. in high
Martian   orbit.
     Experiment in progress? Possible hazards ? Please advise./tSlP.
Thank   you.
     Eight-four rotation meant that each of us would work an eight-hour
  shift, then retire for four hours of sleep, circumstances permitting,
then   work another eight hours again. As it happened, this put me on
the bridge   for a long, uneventful stretch while ahead the planet
swelled and behind   Rapisardi puttered with the detector packages.
Meanwhile, Baucum was in   bioanalyst heaven, making endless
measurements of the sunlight and radar  echoes that had passed through
or bounced off anything remotely mycoric in  origin. She was paying me
less than no attention, so I convinced Lehne to  play a few games of
chess, which he won handily despite the need to  monitor his
instruments.
     And then Wallich and Davenroy returned, and Rapisardi agreed to
skip   his sleep shift, and Baucum tried to skip hers as well but was
denied   permission.
     "We'll need you fully alert for the first deployment," Wallich
told  her.
     "Yes? I should think you'd need Rapisardi fully alert as well."
     He laughed and pointed at the hatchway. "To bed, young lady. Stop
 making sense at me."
     And so she went, and the next stretch gave me even less to do,
even  when another of the radar beacons went off a few times and then
dissolved  into vaporous bloom. Lehne handled the observations Baucum
otherwise would  have, and resource allocation simply wasn't an issue.
I spent the time  composing reports and collages I didn't have the
budget to send.
     Ahead, the planet was getting really large now. We'd cut
magnification   on the shared window from 500X to a hundred, and
finally to fifty, but each   time the image seemed determined to fill
the screen again just as soon as   possible. We were racing toward Mars
at, what, something like three hundred   kilometers per second? At that
speed, the trip from Ganymede to Callisto  would take less than four
hours even at opposition, with the vast bulk of  Jupiter sitting
directly between them. Now that was fast!
     Finally it came time for me to sleep, and Lehne, but by then of
course   we were only two hours away from deployment, so we were
allocated ninety   minutes and an insincere apology. I spent the time
floating weightless in the  darkness of my cabin, with the zee-spec
charging on its rack and the air  vent turned up for maximum white
noise. I'm rarely one to refuse a rest, but   I'd only been awake for
half a day, and catnap sleep eluded me, and in the   end I drifted back
to the bridge grouchy and dry-eyed, wishing I'd simply   stayed there
all along.
     Lehne was already in his seat as I settled into mine and strapped
 myself down. And a lucky thing that was, too, that timely application
of   restraint webbing, because it was at almost exactly that moment
that we were   attacked for the first time.

     EIGHTEEN
     OPPOSITION "

     Object two is venting, Captain," Lehne said. "Fine
mist, possibly vapor.
     "Spectral analysis?"
     "Working," said Baucum. "Organic, sir. Complex."
     Wallich exhaled sharply, through his teeth. "Right in our path,
isn't  it?
     Lovely. Davenroy, give me main engines and full ACS, please. Hang
on,   people, I'm taking us evasive."
     Here and there steering motors groaned to life, pulsing jets of
iron   plasma into the vacuum around us. Louis Pasteur shuddered,
Wallich pitching  and yawing her onto a new course and then demanding
main engine thrust,  completely ruining the finesse of our last burn.
     "Not good enough," Lehne called out. "Cloud dispersal puts us
right   through the edge of it in twenty seconds."
     Wallich slapped his armrest. "Damn. Baucum, what is this crap?"
     "I don't know," she replied in a singsong of tension and
aggravation.
     "It's organic, possibly aminoid haptens. Too light to be mycoric,
if  that helps, but other than that it could be almost anything." "Find
out  in a sec," Lehne said. "Entering vapor cloud. Now." Warning chimes
rang.
     Lights on control panels flashed.
     Baucum let out a tense sigh. "Substance identified, sir: it's
complementin."
     A tipple of alarm ran through the bridge crew.
     My dictionary was sitting open, waiting for just such an
emergency. I   looked the word up: compl[a]-MEN-tin, n., a class of
short-lived lysing   and/or corrosive organic polymers, often employed
as immunotaggants. Okay,   fine. I looked up "immunotaggant" and got: a
molecule attached to a foreign   body or substance, marking
itforphagocytosis and eventual elimination. I saw  I could follow this
chain indefinitely, but "elimination" told me enough.
     We'd been tagged. Like the old story about painting someone with
honey and   staking them out on an anthill. The honey itself wasn't
harmful--it didn't  have to be.
     "Going to clog up the camouflage," Lehne warned.
     Baucum grunted. "Already! I'm reading some replication events on
the   forward hull. It seems to be very slow and tentative for the
moment, but it's   not what we want to see."
     "Damn right," Wallich agreed. "Lehne, hydrofluoric sweat, please.

     Minimum setting. I'm laying us sideways and queuing up a thermal
roll."
     This, at least, I understood. Our mission plan would bring us
closer to   the sun than any human had been in decades (any non-mycoric
human, a part of  my mind insisted), and at such proximities the
thermal expansion imposed by  sunlight was enough to pose a structural
danger. Or a danger to the  t-balance, or something. Anyway, the
"thermal roll" program was designed to  hold our long axis
perpendicular to the sun, and to spin Louis Pasteur   around once per
minute to ensure even heating all the way around. People used   to cook
this way, I know, spinning animal carcasses over a pit of hot   coals.
     Same principle, except in this case it was the stain of
complementin,   rather than heat, that we were spreading out evenly. To
keep any one spot  from becoming too heavily contaminated? Something
like that, surely.
     The forward Window gave up its view of Mars, looked out over empty
  space instead, quiet starscape oozing around in a slow circle. The
Gladholder   fear doll had been kicking around the bridge for days, and
now the rolling   motion must have jostled it loose from some hidden
resting place. "Help," it   said in a muffled, despairing voice. And
then it fell silent again.
     "sweat breaking down complementin," Lehne reported. "Not
advisable,  though. Either way, we start attracting attention pretty
quick, here.
     Never forget, we're crawling with bad bugs."
     Wallich grimaced. "Flash me a schematic of the vapor cloud."
Pause.
     "Hmm. Hmm.
     We're not getting out of this without throwing our trajectory
completely off the deployment corridor."
     Well. To me, that sounded a little too pat to be accidental.
Somebody's  warning us off," I said. "Warning, hell," Wallich replied.
"That shot was  well aimed, and we're going to hit the thing that
fired it in about six  minutes, if the mykies don't get us first. I'd
say we're under attack."
     Everyone froze. Attack. That was the word we'd all been avoiding,
the   word we'd been trying not to have to apply. Because why would
anyone   attack us?
     What possible harm did we represent, to anyone or anything? Even
the  Mycosystem itself had little to fear from us, just a few passive
markers  left behind on the ice floes when our temporary invasion ran
out. But I was  getting used to things not making sense, getting used
to the idea that  inscrutable enemies had been dogging us right along
and would continue to do  so. There were people on Venus, after all,
and looking for sense in the face  of that seemed worse than hopeless.
So okay, we were under attack. By       Gladholders? By Templers? By
someone or something else?
     "We have to break off," Baucum stated. "Really, I mean, that spray
is   exiting at more than twice our velocity relative to the object.
Meaning, they   can keep hitting us with it even after we pass them.
And meanwhile, the   spray's density is increasing as we approach. The
situation is  untenable."
     "Untenable? If we miss this pass, we'll have to turn around and
come  back.
     That's untenable, Baucum."
     "Excuse me, sir," said Rapisardi, his voice cutting through and
surprising everyone. The faux engine room behind the bridge's aft
bulkhead  had been removed during my break, and while voice contact was
of course   maintained, he and Davenroy had been going about their jobs
with very quiet   efficiency. Easy to forget they were even there.
     "Yes?" Wallich demanded.
     "Sir, I've been single-stepping through the payload software all
day,   per your instructions, and I've noticed a funny sort of
loophole. If you're  willing to sacrifice tube one to the effort, I
believe we can clear the path       ahead of us."
     "Explain."
     "Sir, it must be done right away or not at all."
     "Why did you wait so long to inform me?"
     "I just thought of it! For God's sake, Wallich, that object is
hostile.
     Shall I fire on it or not?"
     "Fire on it? Tube one, you mean? Preserving two for the northern
cap?"
     "Correct. May I modify the software?"
     Wallich paused, the muscles of his face twitching, as if unsure
what       expression to form. Then: "Affirmative."
     "Aye, sir. Software modified. Opening tube one. End thermal roll
and maneuver to firing position."
     "Positive vee?" Wallich asked.
     "Yes, positive vee!" Rapisardi shot back. "They're right in front
of   us, for God's sake! What do you thin/i?"
     "Calm downl calm down. Coming around to positive vee. Coming
around.
     Coming around. That's got it. Fire when ready, Mr. Rapisardi."
     "Aye, sir. Firing tube one."
     There was a soft, metallic clank, and then a popping sound. The
ship   vibrated slightly. On the forward window, a score of white,
fist-sized,  roughly spherical objects tumbled out ahead of us, looking
as if they were   rolling down a steep hill toward Infected Mars. In
moments they were  lost from view.
     "Recommend five seconds' thrust along minus-vee, Captain. Slow us
down   a bit; we don't want to be too close."
     "Affirmative, five seconds along minus-vee. Forward thrusters
engaged.
     Hum de dum. Forward thrusters disengaged. You want to tell me what
this  is all about, now?"
     Ahead, the view went blindingly white for a moment, and by the
time the   light had faded and my eyes had recovered from the shock, a
diffuse  mycostructure had filled the path ahead of us, swelling
rapidly.. Actually  swelling, I mean, changing shape, shooting out foggy
lobes and tendrils, and  racing toward us as well. Or us toward it, if
you prefer. I didn't even  have time to scream before we were through
it.
     "Blank that window," Wallich ordered.
     I complied, saw the others doing likewise. Maybe it was better not
to   see right now. But what had that explosion been all about?
Rapisardi had  specifically assured me, assured the crew, assured the
whole Immunity that  the detector packages nestled in tubes one through
thirteen were not  bombs. Had he lied?
     "Did we just kill someone?" I asked.
     "Doubtful," Baucum replied. "The object wasn't that big."
     "So what didwe do?"
     "Spill it, Sudhir," Wallich echoed.
     The biophysicist's voice came back careful, almost embarrassed.
"It's   never been a secret that nuclear energy presents ... certain
dangers. We   think of ladderdown as a 'clean' technology, which in a
radiation sense  it certainly is."
     "But?"
     "But. The quantum spatial distortion is normally induced and
focused   within a shielded reactor, where its effects can be
controlled to within a  few Planck radii. How else to tunnel out only
the desired nucleons, yes? But  if we invert the distortion function
along the B-axis, essentially turning it  inside out in
three-dimensional space, the same ladderdown tunneling can be  induced
stochastically in a much larger spherical shell, centered about the
inductor. Shielding irrelevant, because it's inside the affected
region, you  see? Considered too hazardous for use in bloom
cauterization, the phenomenon       has no industrial applications.
Look it up under Things Not to Try."
     Most of that went right over my head, but the gist seemed clear
enough:  he was talking about releasing energy, lots of it, in an
uncontrolled       manner. He was talking about a bomb.
     "So easy?" Baucum accused. "Youj'ust thought of that?" Rapisardi
cleared his throat. "The, um ... All I needed to change was the sign of
one  input parameter, and of course the activation timer. Two numbers.
It's   fortunate the code was configured as it was, or the idea
mightn't have  occurred to me."
     "Very convenient."
     "Yes? And are you distressed at finding yourself still alive?"
"Almost   time to fire the other tube," Wallich observed, his eyes on
some invisible       chronometer. "Let's knock it off and get back to
work."
     I tensed, knowing what came next. We'd rehearsed this procedure
over   and over, and while there had never been an attack in the middle
of it, this  point was nonetheless the most critical in terms of timing
and tak loading.
     I kept a close eye on the allocation monitors, making sure no one
had too   much or too little of the data system's attention.
     "Coming around to north cap deployment attitude," Wallich said.
     "Attitude achieved. Attitude lock. Rapisardi, open tube number
two,  please."
     "Aye, sir. Tube two open."
     "Prepare to fire."
     "Aye, sir. Ready to fire."
     "Fire."
     The ship clanked and popped and vibrated again.
     "Payload is away," Rapisardi said.
     "Maneuvering to south burn attitude," Wallich called out without
pause.
     And that was it; the payload was away, ten detector packages that
would   slam down upon the Martian polar cap, and alert the Immunity
the moment they   found mycoric activity there, activity that signaled
a new tolerance for  cold, a clear threat to those above. But there was
no comment from any of  us, no sense of triumph or accomplishment. Not
yet, anyway. My arms floated  free as the ship rotated around us.
     Davenroy's voice: "Engine covers are open. Ready main thrust."
     Wallich grunted acknowledgment. "Achieved. Attitude lock. Engage
main       engines."
     From there it was burn and turn, burn and turn, three five-minute
 periods of thrust that would put us in line with the south pole at a
velocity  that wouldn't pulverize the probes as they hit. And then the
covers were   blown off payload tubes three and four, two more open
wounds in our hull, and  the probes were fired out of them. Pop! Pop!
     Throughout all of this I kept stealing looks at Baucum, who
appeared to   be taking all the activity rather poorly, her face gone
gray and shiny.
     Now was not the time for chatter, and I couldn't reach her with my
 hands, so there was no consolation I could offer. But then, it didn't
look  like a consolement sort of mood anyway; more like she was motion
sick or in  fear for her life, either of which could easily be true.
Presently, she took  notice of her instruments, and her frown lines
deepened.
     "Captain, we're being pinged again. I'm reading multiple solid
  echoes, a lot of variation in cross-section."
     "Flash us the data," Wallich said.
     Baucum and Lehne had geeked together a radar sim that would refine
  their earlier solutions based on any new data, and it was a frame
from this   that appeared on my zee: the planet Mars a transparent
globe of red wire,       surrounded by colored lines representing the
targets.
     "Damn," Wallich said. And then, after a hesitation of moments, he
began   to laugh. Not chuckle or giggle or snigger, but laugh, a stiff
braying  spaced out at fixed intervals, as if something were pressing
     rhythmically on his stomach, forcing the air out in measured
bursts. "Ha!
     Ha!
     Ha! Ha!"
     "Sir?" Baucum said, turning, looking at him uncertainly.
     Wallich's grinning face was red, the pace of his laughter picking
up.
     "Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha!"
     This was not good. On a scale of good to not good, this was
definitely   on the "not" side of the spectrum. Even I couldn't afford
to go to pieces in   the middle of a-- But then, as suddenly as it had
begun, the laughter cut   off, and Wallich was blinking, looking at his
bridge crew looking back at   him. His eyes narrowed for a moment,
suspicious at our stares, and then he  was all business again.
     "Hiding behind the planet," he said, eyeing (no doubt) the display
  Baucum had flashed over.
     "What are they?" I asked. Demanded, really, because this was
another   one of those things nobody was talking about, and at this
point I damn well   wanted to know.
     Wallich shrugged, made a face of exaggerated innocence at me. "A
few of   these radar cross-sections are big enough to be manned ships.
Probably that's       exactly what they are; this doesn't feel like
pure machine activity,  does it?
     And teleoperation is out; the light lag from even the Gladholds is
too  severe. So there need to be human beings down here running the
show.
     Got to be. The rest of the objects are much smaller, though:
probes,  small weapons platforms, who knows? Probably teleoperated from
the ships via  laser beam, although I suppose some of them could be
autonomous.
     "Earth's navies used to use a similar approach: manned vessels
surrounded by swarms of attendant machinery. Less vulnerability that
way,  more fluid response. How long would they last if the radar
beacons were right  on the ships? About two seconds. So they put the
radar out on drones, and   listened passively to the echoes.
     Weapons, same thing; the humans were there to guide the attack,
not to  participate directly. That's what I think is going on, here.
The real  question is, who are they? The Temples of Transcendent
Evolution aren't up  to a prank like this."
     "Not without help," Lehne said.
     I protested: "This is not a prank. This is a murder."
     "Not much of a murder," the disembodied voice of Jenna Daw enroy
observed.
     "On their present course it'll take them half an hour to intercept
us."
     "Well," Wallich said, "clearly we aren't where they expected us to
be.
     They probably thought we'd break off to avoid their.., spritzing
machine.
     Whatever it was."
     "Maybe lucky for us," Lehne said.
     Yeah. Probably very lucky.
     · 	"I'm reading plasma clouds near several of the echoes," Baucum
     warned, her eyes on invisible instruments.
     "Propulsive?" Wallich asked.
     "Hydrogen-iron spectrum," she confirmed. A ladderdown signature.
     This time, his chuckle sounded natural and humorless. "Coming
after us,   are they? Well, let's see if they'll follow us all the way
down. I'm   bringing us around to trans-Earth injection attitude.
Davenroy, uncover the  main engines again, please."
     Below, the planet was an enormous symbol of yin and yang- bisected
by  sunlight, huge enough to appear flat rather than spherical. How
high above  it were we? A few thousand kilometers? Even at normal
magnification, it was  like holding a dinner plate right in front of
your nose.
     A moldy dinner plate, I should say, or, more precisely.., imagine
 looking down, from a height of three or four meters, on a lawn of
unkempt  grass, patchy, shot through with strangling weeds. Now imagine
that the  grass and weeds are transparent, faint rainbows twinkling
here and there,  and that a low, unmoving ground fog enshrouds them
all. The fog, on closer  inspection, is in fact a mad crisscross of
translucent threads, and the soil  beneath it all has the ruddy, airy
look of wet clay pressed through       mesh. Visually, this is what
Mars looked like as we raced by.
     Emotionally, with what artists used to call the "eye of the
heart," I   saw instead an open wound, polluted flesh wriggling with
maggots and   bacterial slime. The corpse of a planet, all beauty
transmuted to horror  and rot.
     Looking at it, I felt a rush of absolute terror: what in God's
name   were we doing? Even Tug Jinacio had died at the hands of this
stuff. How had  we gotten down here? How had we dared?
     But already I could see the features receding, the edges of the
planet   itself growing visibly smaller. Closest approach had come and
gone, then; wi   were leaving this world, not approaching it. Already!
God, we were   moving fast.
     "Trans-Earth injection attitude achieved," Wallich said crisply.
     "Davenroy, fire the engines, please."
     "Aye, sir."
     The sense of acceleration was light but immediate. We were putting
on   speed, putting distance between ourselves and this bloom of a
world at an       ever-increasing rate. Good riddance, was all I could
think.
     "Objects are moving to intercept," Wallich observed. Then, maybe
ten   seconds later: "I don't think they can catch us. But they can
sure as  hell follow."
     "Replication events on the hull are stepping up," Baucum said,
gray-faced, just to let us know our troubles weren't over. Fear danced
like  bubbles of ice water through my veins.
     Wallich simply pressed his lips together in an expression of
distaste.
     "HF sweat not cutting it, eh? Lehne, what are the indications for
increased flowrate?"
     	"Contraindicated, definitely."
     	"Are we damaging the hull?"
     "Probably. No time for a serious inspection right now, but if
something  starts eating through, you'll know for sure. Main thing is,
the hydrogen  long are J3od. Maybe even fluorine, depending. Neutralize
one pathogen,   great, but you leave behind a useful residue of TGL
debris. Complementin is  mostly gone by now; I say stop the sweat."
     Wallich mulled this over, nodding unhappily. I understood his
dilemma--to fight off external pathogens he really had only two useful
weapons: variations in pH, and variations in temperature. And the
release of   active immunocytes, sure, but that was tantamount to a
declaration of war   against an effectively omnipotent foe. Not smart,
except maybe as a last   resort.
     		meanwhile, any variation in hull conditions rendered the But
t-balance  that much less effective, that much less likely to fool the
mycospores  attached to it. The result was a tightrope walk: the more
numerous and  active the spores, the stronger the countermeasures
required to foil them,  ergo the more activity on our part and more
suspicion on theirs... But doing  nothing wasn't much of an option,
either, not if they were already  starting to replicate.
     "Recommendations?"
     Wallich asked finally.
     	"Ing purge, level one," Lehne replied, with a reluctant grunt of
     approval soon following from Baucum.
     	"This close to the planet?"
     Lehne nodded. "Qpench and warm. Five minutes, tops. Vapor should
boil   off most of them, along with contaminants, and the rest ... We
don't crack  them up with the thermal shock, well, at least they wake
up cold on a  clean, hypoantigenic surface."
     "Why not just leave it cold?" I asked. I realized this had been
bothering me for some time; why didn't we always run cold? Coat the
hull with  liquid nitrogen and blast through the Mycosystem like a
miniature comet,   frigid as the surface of Ganymede itself? I was
recording, and it occurred to  me that I'd used my reporter voice to
ask the question. Some habits  simply don't die.
     Wallich looked briefly surprised, as if he'd forgotten I was
aboard, or  forgotten I was anything more than an allocations console
operator. But then  his patient-captainwarmingtothe-cameras look
switched on, along with a faint  smile. "Sensible question, Strasheim,
but life is unfortunately not that  simple. Temperature doesn't mean
quite the same thing on the nanoscale,  especially in hard vacuum and
bright sunlight. Cold surfaces just attract a       different sort of
trouble down here."
     "I see," I said. "May I pester you for details later?"
     He laughed. "If there's a later, you certainly may."

     NINETEEN
     CRACKING PRESSURE

     Every time Louis Pasteur
strikes a  foreign object, whether spore or dust mote or living
mycostructure, atoms  are knocked free from its t-balance surface in
proportion to the square of  our relative velocity, which has been
consistently higher than original#an.
     Individually these events are trivial almost to the point of
nonexistence,  but the cumulative erosion from thousands of such events
every day will  eventually begin to impair this most important of our
defenses.
     "Eventually" might have meant as much as four or five years, if
not for  the corrosive effects of a chemical taggant, nineteen abortive
microblooms,  and the acids and solvents used to remove the remains of
same. Estimates of  our survival time are now measured in months, and
will remain in the  double digits only so long as no further misfortune
befalls us.
     Given that the five unidentified spaceships currently pursuing
us--and   their attendant swarm of apparently unmanned instrument and
weapons   platforms--are only three light-seconds behind, and that we
must certainly  slow down to deploy our detector packages when we get
to Earth, and then  very nearly reverse our course for the return home,
such fortune appears   unlikely.
     and no, we can't abort the mission--I've asked. First of all,
deployment of these detectors may of course prove frightfully important
to the   well-being of the Immunity. Second and more immediately, our
fuel supply  will not carry us home without the gravity assist of at
least one more  planetary flyby. Oh well, I did promise Momma I'd say
hallo to the  Earth.
     from Let's Get the Living Fuck Out of Here © 2106 by John
Strasheim  (Author's Preferred Text)

     attack 5+ unknw enmy ship @ Mars, msn ongoing but Erth =
bigprobm

     from Let's Get the Living Fuck Out of Here © 2106 by John
Strasheim  (Text As Transmitted)

Things sounded pretty hot on the
bridge--we'd been  encountering a more aggressive breed of mycorum
since leaving Mars  behind--but Baucum was just finishing her sleep
rotation and I was just  starting mine, and unless specifically called
up to help, I was determined  to take the opportunity to talk with her.
Not so much for personal reasons,  although that was a factor, as for
professional ones. Spacer professional, I  mean, not as a berichter.
She'd been so strange since the attack, not so  much frightened as
diminished, defeated, somehow both brittle and limp, and  considering I
now probably knew her better than any of the others did, it  seemed
natural that I should be the one to find out just exactly what the
 problem was.
     Aside from the obvious, I mean--we were all pretty much at a loss,
like  sleepy mice whose nest has suddenly turned out to be the inside
of some  terrible machine. Worse than that, really, because unlike the
Mycosystem  itself, these solid enemies were trying to kill us, hoping
to kill us,  actively thinking about the process of killing us. That's
a very personal,  very immediate sensation. But it didn't have the rest
of us slumping around       like our spines had been broken.
     I cornered Baucum coming out of the head, and when she saw me
there she   tried to close the door again, right in my face. I stuck a
foot in it, which   she obligingly slammed between fanfold and frame.
The door wasn't heavy, and  my wide shoes were of course filled with
lead, but the gesture was  hurtful just the same.
     "Ouch," I told her gravely.
     "I don't want to talk to you, Strasheim."
     "This isn't a personal call."
     "I don't care what it is, I don't feel like talking, and I believe
I   have that right. Now if you'll excuse me--" "You don't have the
right," I  said, "where the safety of the ship is concerned."
     "Fuck the safety of the ship," she replied calmly, and Jenna
Davenroy,   who was also just coming offshift, chose that precise
moment to pop       through the hatchway from the engine room.
     "Hallo," she said uncertainly. "Am I interrupting?"
     "No," Baucum and I said in unison. "I was just leaving," Baucum
added.
     Davenroy was a good fifteen years older than Baucum, and it
showed,   suddenly, in the easy condescension she was able to project
through what was   otherwise a look of polite concern. "Dear, it's no
use trying to keep things  to yourself around here. What concerns any
of us concerns us all. I   appreciate your quite natural desire for
privacy, but in this context it's  really rather rude. I've been spying
on you, did you know that? Keeping a  little window on you since I
noticed what a wreck you'd become. What  happened back there to shake
you up so badly?"
     Baucum pulled the washroom door fully open, sullen. "It's
complicated."
     "Really."
     "Why don't you--" I began, but Baucum's glare turned on me and the
  words dried up. She was really upset, like maybe poised on the brink
of   violence.
     "We dropped our detectors," Baucum said, "and son of a gun, they
really   were bombs after all."
     "They were used as bombs," Davenroy corrected. "In defense against
 an unprovoked attack."
     "Was it unprovoked?"
     Davenroy clucked. "Any danger we might possibly represent is to
the  Mycosystem, to the blind voracity of mindless, microscopic
machines.
     That hardly constitutes a threat."
     "And if our activities disturb the Mycosystem in some way? If I
lived   in the Gladholds, and I found out someone was going to blast a
hole in  Infected Mars, you'd better believe I'd feel threatened about
it."
     I thought about that, and realized she was probably onto
something. The  Temples of Transcendent Evolution, or rather the
fanatics from whom they'd  tried to disassociate themselves, were no
more capable of launching a       t-balance battle fleet than Julf
Ernst and the gang back at the shoe  factory.
     But as propagandists the Temples had no peer in the solar system;
 starting from nothing, in a decade and a half they'd recruited tens of
 thousands of people, not all of whom were stupid or gullible. Not by a
long  shot. So how hard would it be for them to drop a few discreet
hints, mail  down a collage or two to selected Gladholder net channels?
Find a few  well-placed kindred spirits, open up a dialogue...
     In fact, this was one of those obvious-in-retrospect revelations
that   leave you feeling stupid afterward. Right, yes, it must have
happened that   way, else how could this situation have come about?
What other plausible   scenario was there?
     "So that's who we're fighting," I said, and already my mind was
off   crafting reports that would imply all of this, leaving the
connections plain  for any reader to see without specifically
implicating any one person or  organization. Sincere but misguided,
certain dements may have sought the mad       industrial might of
reckless foreigners...
     Davenroy, though, was not impressed. "Defending our lives is
hardly a   crime, but endangering us with hazardous chemical sprays
certainly is.
     Whoever is behind all this should have stepped out months ago and
aired  their grievances publicly."
     "As if that would help," Baucum muttered. "The supposed 'right' to
  survival is not just a priority for most people, it's the only factor
they're   willing to consider, and never a thought for the rights of
anything else.
     There used to be human beings who found importance, even
sacredness, in  literally everything around them. Not just the living
things, either."
     But Davenroy was shaking her head, almost mournfully, as if to
indicate   how very sorry she was that Baucum should be so dense.
"Those people were   turned to goo, dear. How sacred. The Mycosys-tem
never took anyone's rights   into account, it simply took the substance
of their bodies for its own   purposes.
     Nothing as destructive and useless as that will ever be 'sacred'
to the       people whose lives have been.., devastated by it. Shame on
you.
     Shame!"
     She was really angry, not faking it for dramatic effect but
probably   actually holding it back, or trying to. Her hands quivered.
But now it was   Baucum's turn to look superior.
     "You talk," she said, "precisely as if the discovery of living
humans   in the Mycosystem had never happened." Her look expanded to
encompass me   as well.
     "You've been complaining, John, about congenital flws in Immune
culture.
     Here's one for you: we hold to outmoded theories even in the face
of  overwhelming counter-evidence. We look at the Mycosystem and we see
'scary  goo,' and never mind about the information content of the
spores we see  sifting through it every second of every day. We call it
'mindless' without  ever once attempting to interpret its signals, and
when we see unambiguous  signs of purposeful activity, we simply fail
to integrate it. It doesn't  jibe with what we know, so we do our best
to ignore it."
     "I haven't been ignoring it," I said.
     Davenroy just snorted. "I find your use of the word 'unambiguous'
very  illuminating, dear. Really, your theory is very interesting, and
when you       have more than a few blurry images to support it, do let
me know."
     Davenroy had been moving in the direction of her cabin, and
presently she entered it and pulled the door closed with a decisive
click.
     Baucum and I eyed one another uncomfortably, and I was thinking,
well,   having precipitated this exchange I should probably precipitate
its peaceful  conclusion as well. Davenroy had always been a bit touchy
on the subject of  the Mycosystem, and Baucum, too, but they weren't
ever going to see eye to  eye without some more effective information
sharing. So I said, "When she       wakes up, would you like me to show
her the cellular automaton stuff?"
     But before I'd even finished speaking, Baucum snapped, "Oh, just
shut   up, Strasheim." And just like that, she kicked off and launched
herself   toward the bridge.
     You get used to crisis the same way you get used to anything else,
and   when I heard banging and voices outside my cabin door I fell
awake and  snapped the lights on, pausing only to snatch up my zee-spec
before slamming  the door open and tumbling out. This before I'd formed
any conscious thought  at all, the routine as automatic as a bodily
function. Only when I was  outside did I start to wonder what was going
on.
     Davenroy and Baucum were facing each other across the wardroom;
fierce,       territorial animals looking as if they were about to tear
each other  apart.
     Actually, judging by the panting breaths and the disarray of
Baucum's   hair, that process might already have begun. Tosca Lehne
peered out from the   bridge hatchway, Rapisardi from his own cabin
across from mine, and Wallich   was in the middle of the room, between
the two women.
     "What happened?" I asked.
     "Everyone calm down," Wallich said, not to me but to Jenna
Davenroy.
     "Oh, I don't think so," Davenroy replied, and tried to launch
herself   past him. The quarters were way too cramped for that, though,
and he caught   her easily in the crook of his arm, slowing her. Their
joined momentum   carried them in Baucum's direction, but she slid out
of the way, her angry  eyes never leaving Davenroy.
     "Ha," said Wallich stiffly. "Ha, ha, ha." And then his face
cleared and   he said, "God damn it, what the hews the matter with you
two?"
     Davenroy stabbed an accusing finger at Baucum. "She was sabotaging
the   engine control software! I caught her at it, red-handed!"
     "I was just looking," Baucum fired back, clearly shaken but trying
hard   not to show it. "I wanted to see if that was a bomb, too."
     "Rubbish!" Davenroy cried. "You were modifying the gain states. I
have   the before-and-after compare, and the time-synched image of your
precious   little fingers wiggling every time a change is logged. I
used to think you   couldn't possibly be our saboteur; no one would be
stupid enough to plant   someone as obvious as you. But then, it's
generally a mistake to  underestimate stupidity's power, isn't it?"
     "Hold on a minute," Wallich protested, holding his hands up
again,       symbolically pushing the two women apart.
     I was about to add my voice to his, to explain that this was all a
 misunderstanding brought on by stress and fear and overcrowding, and
we  really should all have a chat session about it before things really
got out  of hand... But then I caught a look at Baucum's face, the set
of her       shoulders and the angle of her feet, and suddenly I knew
it was all true.
     My first reaction was simple surprise: "But ... My god, Bau-cum,
you   told me if you wanted to sabotage the ship we'd never know.
Something   invisible, microscopic." I couldn't think what else to say
to her, how to  complete the thought.
     I suddenly felt very stupid, and her give-me-a-break expression
didn't  help a bit. "You believed me so easily," she said. "You think
i can do those  things? Without triggering the Immune system? Yot think
that's easier       than simply planting a bug?"
     For a moment, no one moved, and it was Baucum herself who broke
the  spell.
     "Really, people, do you have any idea of the scale of the
operation   against you? I didn't let them recruit me, exactly, but I
didn't turn them in   for trying, either. Believe me, you don't want to
know who it was that   approached me."
     "So what were you doing?" Wallich asked gravely.
     She shrugged, a miserably failed attempt at nonchalance. "Believe
me,   I'd like to get out of this as much as you, but I finally
realized I   couldn't continue failing to act. My conscience betrays my
survival   instinct."
     "That's unfortunate," Sudhir Rapisardi observed dryly. Wallich
laughed.
     "Renata," I said, "what are you talking about?"
     You don't "step" in zero gravity the way you do on a planet, but
you   can move and pause in small increments, using feather-light
touches of hands  and feet to regulate the forward momentum.2 In this
way, I stepped out of my   room and approached Baucum, cautiously and
nonthreateningly.
     She looked hunted, though, tensing at the sight of me. "Stay away,
  Strasheim.
     You've already made this a lot harder than it needs to be."
     "Made what harder? Sabotaging the engine? Did you really do that?
My   god, Baucum, why?"
     She shrugged. "I had to. You know, the Temples are not simply
insane they know a lot more about technogenic life than is general.
     	I've since learned that the technical term for this is
"chuttering," a       word that seems particularly unlikely to enter
the popular lexicon.
Their laboratories have reproduced the gross
characteristics of all the major bloom types, including full-up
transient   megastructures, using cellular automata. They've even
allowed ac-ma] spores  to germinate in controlled environments. Off the
inhabited worlds,  obviously, but what better way to study an entity or
phenomenon than to  reproduce it directly? You want to learn about
fires, you start one. I've  always wondered why the Immunity shies away
from this."
     "How about 'abject horror'?" Wallich asked with an uneasy grin.
"I'm   afraid you've got me genuinely flummoxed, Baucum. You're the
saboteur? You're   in league with the Temples? The Mycosystem is an
'entity'? I'll tell you,   I'm half tempted to send you off to sleep
and see if you wake up normal  again."
     Baucum shook her head, fanning long, unpinned hair out behind her.

     "Entity may have been a poor choice of words. The My-cosystem is
not so  much intelligent as genuinely divine, at least in an
organizational sense.
     That may sound crazy, but it's the only interpretation I haven't
been  able to rule out. I've done the math."
     "Oh, it sounds crazy all right," Walich said. He looked around at
the   rest of us. "So, what are we going to do with this?"
     I knew exactly what he meant. There was no brig on this tiny crawl
  space of a ship; even the cabin doors locked only from the inside,
and  feebly at that.
     And even if we somehow managed to confine her, Baucum would still
be   armed and dangerous unless we also relieved her of her zee-spec,
which seemed   an almost inhumanly cruel sensory deprivation. To leave
her literally   staring at blank walls, for months? Who wouldn't go
crazy, living like that?
     And even then, she'd be only a few steps from the engine room, a
few more  from the bridge, and she'd be using the toilet as often as
ever ... Could  she sabotage the mission by flushing down the wrong
things? Possibly! We'd  have to watch her closely, twenty-four hours a
day.
     Really, the sensible thing to do was to put her out the airlock.
That   sounds awful, I know--I was shocked by the thought myself--but
the  obviousness of it was hard to ignore. Vacuum was all around us,
all the  time; our most plentiful resource. Never mind what it would do
to those soft  tissues I'd so recently admired.
     "Give her to the Mycosystem if she loves it so much," Davenroy
said.
     Her voice was now largely free of rancor, sounding kind of
disbelieving  and apologetic, as if the qualifier, "assuming this isn't
all some dreadful       mistake," should certainly be assumed.
     Wincing as if needle-stung, Baucum cast her a cryptic look. "Be
careful   what you wish for, Davenroy." A sheen of sweat had broken out
on Baucum's  forehead. Her skin looked gray. "The real problem with
exponential growth is  that until you hit the knee of the curve, the
slope is shallow, practically  flat Unfortunately, this translates into
a period of unavoidable suffering.
     I told myself I'd never use this thing--hard to let them put it
in,       otherwise!--and then I told myself it wouldn't hurt. Pretty
lies."
     "Thing?" I asked. "What thing? Are you in pain?"
     She winced again sharply, then offered me a grimace of a smile. "I
had   a stomach ulcer once. It feels about the same."
     I was still chuttering forward, was now less than two meters from
 Baucum's right shoulder. Her face was even grayer and shinier now.
     "Why are you in pain?" I asked.
     The look she gave me was full of guilt and fear. "Temples labs
have put   a high priority on storage methods for technogenic spores.
It's very   difficult research, considering the.., cost of failure, but
recently they've  been able to document safe, long-term storage at...
room temperature. Or  even body temperature. I'm sorry."
     My skin went instantly clammy. Body temperature? Body temperature?
"Are   you saying you're full of spores?"
     "I'm sorry!" she cried suddenly. Tears quivered at the corners of
her  eyes.
     "The storage cyst is ruptured; I can't undo that. Oh God,
Strasheim,  I'm/tilling you. I didn't... I wasn't trying to fool you.
I'm sorry! If       things had been different..."
     She gasped, then screamed. Alarm klaxons sounded. Warning lights
began   to flash. Baucum's skin began to change color, and then to
shimmer in an  oil-on-water sort of way. She screamed again, and this
time it sounded all       wrong, like she was coughing up a lungful of
dandelion fluff, or trying  to.
     I don't want to tell this part of the story. Tug Jinacio's bloom
was   bad enough, the stuff of permanent nightmare, but I didn't know
him. I'd   never touched him.
     What--what happened next was that Wallich got around behind her,
bracing his hands on the doorway ofTosca Lehne's cabin.
     "Open the ' ' '" airlocc, he shouted, to no one in particular. But
Lehne  was diving fOr the emergency locker, Davenroy and Rapisardi were
trapped on  the wrong side of danger, and I was right there, not a
meter and a half from  the controls. I'd like to say I took a moment to
ponder the implications of  this pending action, but in fact Baucum's
skin had lost its smoothness, had  developed an unmistakable
powdery-vapory aura of rainbow-blossoming  mycostructure, and I was
more afraid of that than I can tell you, more   afraid than if she were
burning, or aiming a weapon, or anything.
     So I launched myself straight at the airlock, slapped the red
button,   then flailed out of the way with panicky movements as
Wallich, firmly   braced, put the soles of his shoes on Baucum's left
side, against the   as-yet-unmarred surface of her spacer blues, and
shoved. She sailed, coughing  and struggling, and then she was inside,
banging off the walls, and I was  moving one button down on the panel.
She opened her eyeswhat was left of  them, anyway--and seemed to look
right at me as the inner hatch closed, with  her on the wrong side of
it. My very own hand on the button that would kill  her, and it seemed
that she looked right at me, and knew.
     Do they say death by vacuum is quick? Painless? Do they really?
God   help me, I pressed the button. And that's all I can bring myself
to say.
     It took us five minutes to clear away the pockets of visible
infection   Baucum had left before they cleared us away, but that was
just the start,  just the opening act of a drama that was to last seven
hours and more.
     Wallich and Lehne and Rapisardi brought all their skills and
knowledge into  play, forcing them down through the arcane interfaces
of the ship's Immune  system while Davenroy cajoled and exhorted me
into helping her wipe all the  surfaces down with acids and solvents
and trying our best to keep the  ship running.
     I've kept most of the images, though I never got around to col
.....
     laging them. I remember Wallich screaming at one point: "It's
pierced  the hull. This God damn thread is growing right through the
hull." I  remember Tosca Lehne hurriedly painting the spot with a
welding torch until  the bulkhead glowed red, and whether he knew what
he was doing or not, the  tactic seemed to work; they quickly found
other things to be upset  about.
     Meanwhile, something nasty had been growing in a corner by the
shower,  something class three and fecund, branchy with crystalline
spikes.
     Resonating spikes, it turned out; the noise began as an air-leak
hiss  and rose slowly into a tinkling of clear, high tones. Soft fog
then enfolded  the mess, shaping and pressing on it, giving the sound
an almost fricative   quality, for a moment, like a human whisper.
Short-lived, of course; the  so-called "singing blooms," stuff of
barroom legend, had never been recorded  in action, and this one was no
exception. By the time I'd gotten in for a  clear look, Daven-roy had
splattered a witch's tit on the area and  frozen it solid.
     Its last words were, and I quote, "Whuh, whuh, whuuuh."
     			We took another twenty minutes to clear away the mess, during
		which time another fistful of problems made themselves known. We
could  have used Tug Jinacio that morning, you bet, but then again
		we could have  used Renata Baucum, too. The difference between
seven people and six is not  all that much, but knock it down to five
and the house starts to feel  more than a little bit empty. Did I
love 		her? Hell, I'm not even sure I  know what the word means. I
wished 		she were still alive, wished she hadn't  betrayed us, wished
that she	really were the woman I'd thought she  was. I'd fallen in
love with 		that woman, I guess.
     		Agony, though: my hand on the button that killed her. I wished
to  God it wasn't so, wished to God the memory would leave me, but
horror can  only pile upon horror for so long before it saturates
your 		ability to  repress. Was it self-defense, that premeditated act
of mur 		der? Could I at  least convince myself of that? Could I at
least quiet 		the trembling of  my hands?
     		The eventual victory for our side was a hollow one, as it turned
 		out; not only had we used up damned near all of our emergency
		supplies,  lost part of the food stores, and damaged our recycler in
an 		ill-considered  attempt to sterilize it, but by the time we'd
finally 		added all the new  pathogens to our response library and
gotten the 		Immune system locked down  in a swarm-on-detection mode,
it had 		become clear that we were not the only  combatants. There were
		Gladholder phages still out and about, reproducing  and mutating, 	7!
	occasionally hindering our efforts but more often helping,  and
		putting together organized communications networks of their own 		as
their collective mass began to approach that of our own Immune
		system.
     In the old days, there used to be a game called "golf," which in
volved  hitting a little white ball around on ridiculously vast tracts
of 	meadow  and forest. Like any sport, it was often fiercely
competitive, as remembered  by a paper comic drawing pinned to the
bridge door of Beluga, the dust barge  that had Evacuated my family to
Ganymede. In the picture, lines of black ink  sketch out clouds
drifting across an open sky, and beneath them the  spectators at a golf
tournament, fleeing madly as a gooey-looking and  surprisingly animated
bloom marches across the landscape toward them,  pulling trees and
fences down into a mess which, on close inspection, proves  to be
composed of little cartoon mushrooms with teeth. A lone
golfer--perhaps the caricature of some actual person, as the initials
J.P.
     are prominent on his cap--stands at the tee, preparing to strike
his ball  even as the mycora are lapping at the backs of his heels.
He's aware of the  danger, judging by the hunch of his shoulders and
the manic set of his eyes,  but by golly he's going to make the shot.
     "Looks like we're colonized," Wallich observed, once thextent of
the  Gladholder phages' involvement had become clear. "Good luck
getting us  through quarantine." He chuckled a little when he said
this, the tone of it       clearly indicating he didn't think we'd be
getting home at all.
     So I surprised him by pantomiming a golfer's swing and recounting
 J.P.'s final words: "If this one doesn't make the green, I quit."
     Wallich's laughter seemed to go on forever.

     TWENTY
     THE SPACES BETWEEN

     Mulch World had given way to
grander  demonstrations, had become one tiny component of a much larger
and more  intricate Mulch System, hot and cold and temperate planets
swinging around a  bright central star. I'd found ways to trick the
cellular automaton rule  base into generating phenomena analogous to
gravity, heat radiation, and  even a crude sort of solar wind, and
together they produced an intricate  dynamic as red TGL spores appeared
on the surface of one world and gradually  bloomed and seeded their way
to others.
     Resolution had increased by a factor of twenty over earlier
versions,  and now the conversion of a planetary crust had taken on an
eerie fractal  beauty, as moird patterns shuddered and melted one into
the other, rock and  biomass giving way to bloom giving way to voids
and bubbles and  short-lived pockets of mulch.
     The conversion process was inexorable, but unstable; still,
always, the  system eventually died. Or locked into perpetual
oscillations, yes, but my  physical laws now included semirandom
"quantum" perturbations that tended to  disrupt these loops, casting
them back into chaos. But what perturbation  could reverse entropy on
so grand a scale? None, of course. Mulch System was       durable only
in a state of extinction.
     I'd covered this failure by simply slowing down the clock speed.
Now   the patterns could march on for hours or even days before
collapsing, and by  interrupting and restarting the sims while they
were still healthy, I could  create the illusion of stable, perpepaal
chaos. Once I'd figured out I could  "improve" the experiment without
actually tracking down and fixing its  congenital flaws, I decided to
go whole hog: increase magnification by two  orders and move the whole
operation into a virtual cavern a hundred times  larger than
Philusburg. Worlds the size of houses, boiling with endless  varieties
of contagion and countercontagion ... It wasn't exactly beautiful,
 but its violence was grand, sweeping, and entirely virtual.
So I moved in.
     Great idea, right? We were three days out from Mars, still five
away   from Earth, when they sent someone in to see me. Oh, I'd been
doing my job   and everything, filling that chair on the bridge for
fourteen hours of every  twenty-four, keeping a window open on the real
world, but it didn't take a  genius to figure out where my attention
was focused, and unfortunately I was  surrounded by four geniuses. I'd
been spending the off-duty hours alone in  my cabin, and it was here
that Jenna Davenroy came to visit, knocking and  knocking on the door
until finally I was forced to open it.
     "Yes?" I asked the tiny figure she presented in the tiny my-eye
window   I'd opened.
     "I'm slaving my zee-spec to yours," she said by way of greeting.
"If   you'd be so kind as to flash me a copy of the sim you're
inhabiting..."
     I thought about this for a while.
     "Strasheim," she said, "it's really a lot easier if you just let
me in.
     The alternative is confiscation of your zee. Do you want that?"'
Sighing, I opened and worked the appropriate menus. Cabin-wall camera
dots       recorded her image, flashing color and spatial data to
processors in my  zee.
     A shadow figure appeared before me in Mulch System Cavern, rezzed
in   with fractal detail, and finally faded from black to color. Jenna
Davenroy   had entered the sim.
     It was several seconds before she spoke. Her initial reaction,
looking  around, was one of pure startlement, fading slowly into
distaste, and  then finally a sort of slow, grudging admiration. "You
made all this?"
     she asked. I nodded, shrugged. "Cellular automata?"
     "Yes." The rusty, disused sound of my voice surprised me a little.
She   looked around some more, drifting out under one of the roiling,
fluid,  tower-sprouting planets to admire it from directly below. The
real Davenroy  probably hadn't moved, or hadn't moved much, but here in
VR space she could  do as she pleased, unbounded by trivialities like
inertia unless she willed       it. She'd stopped, as they say, on a
dime.
     "You have an eye for detail," she said, looking up at the planet's
  south polar cap. "Mountains jutting through the ice, and turbulence
in the       atmosphere around them. Is this Earth?"
     "Mulch World," I said.
     The lines in her face deepened for a moment. "Oh. I see. We've ...
been   a bit worried about you, Strasheim. I confess, I thought you
were just sort   of whacking off in here. I didn't realize you were
working. System usage   should have been a clue, I guess; you're
slopping a lot of computation off  into the ship's data system." "I
wouldn't call it work."
     She eyed me. "You do yourself an injustice, John. This is really
quite       impressive."
     "It doesn't function correctly," I said, "and anyway the hard
parts   were finished weeks ago. I'm just hiding in here. You were
right."
     "Would you like to talk about it?" She moved closer, drifting like
a  ghost.
     But not too much closer.
     I shrugged, held out the virtual paper telegram I'd created to
represent the mail message the sanitarium had sent. Davenroy drifted
closer,  accepted it, examined it.
     Dear John Strasheim: This is to inform you regretfully of the
death of  your mother Lorena lynn Strasheim at 0218 on the third of
December. No  suffering on her part is indicated. Concomitant with last
will and testament  stipulations, remains have been laddered down at
South Reactor Five. Our  sympathies are with you at this difficult
time.
     "Oh," Davenroy said, reading the thing. "Oh, my goodness, I had no
  idea."
     I smiled wanly. "They used her to light the city. It's a pretty
thought, in a way, but also more than a little bit horrible. She's cut
right  out of the cycle of life. She's a lump of iron now. Waste
metal."
     Davenroy sounded shocked. "This must have happened right after
the  battle.
     Strasheim, I'm so sorry!"
     "It's been a big month for death," I said, shrugging.
     She composed herself, handed the massless, textureless paper back
to   me. "You should have said something, dear, you really should. I
mean, my   goodness, you came to talk to me after Jinacio died. Do you
realize how  important a gesture that was? The pain of loss is at its
most unbearable  when we think it's gone unnoticed."
     I turned to look at her. "You never knew my mother, dear, and you
never   liked Renata Baucum. You don't know a thing about what I've
lost. I barely   know it myself."
     With that, I skidded back, stopped, pretended to busy myself with
an       examination of Mulch World's moon in its slow, stately orbit.
     "We can spare your full attention for the moment," Davenroy said
after   a while. "Under the circumstances, I think the duty roster can
be adjusted.
     But keep the larger circumstance in mind, will you? Even under the
best  conditions, we couldn't afford to run three crew members short
for the Earth       flyby."
     I turned to look at her, paused, nodded slowly. "I do understand
that.
     Yes."
     "Have you shed tears, Strasheim?"
     I choked back an embarrassed laugh. "Swollen eyelids don't show up
well   in VR, I guess. At times I've done little else. It's my mother
we're  talking about."
     "And your lover."
     I winced. "I, uh, don't know. About that."
     "No?"
     "I don't think I knew her. I'm actually sure that I didn't. What
she's   done is... incomprehensible."
     Davenroy grunted. "Yes, it is that. Who can say what was in her
mind?
     Suicide takes a great deal of conviction, of course; murder
perhaps even  more.
     She must have thought she was protecting something important."
     At this, we both looked around at Mulch System, at the infected
planets   and the viscid, fingery haze just barely visible in the
spaces between   them.
     Important, yeah.
     After that, neither of us spoke for about a minute. It was, in a
strange way, the most soothing and intimate part of our conversation
that  day. I treasure it still, one of those rare reminders that the
people around  us really can be caring and kind, if you let them. "Soul
markers," I  call these moments.
     "I ... didn't mean to start an argument," I said finally. "It
isn't..,   easy to talk. I'll be fine, I'm sure, but right now the
whole idea just has   me confused. Death? What the hell is that? What
address do I mail to?"
     "I understand perfectly," Davenroy replied, her tone lightly
admonishing. I took the hint: who in the Immunity was a stranger to
loss? The  last ten years had been quiet, busy, reasonably safe, and
we'd all worked  hard to project that veneer of normalcy, that feeling
that there was nothing  weird about living as we did, where we did. It
wasn't hard; the hysterical  types had died out early, leaving behind
only those who could function, only  those who could survive the trip,
hollow out the caves . .. But the hurt was  still there, always there.
You don't lose a world without hurt.
     I tried to think of a suitable reply, but Davenroy worked some
menus   and winked out of view before I could frame one. I heard my
cabin door   closing, the sound surprisingly near and immediate. I and
my grief were   dismissed.
     Overhead, Mulch World's moon passed into eclipse, the meters-wide
body   of the planet blocking out the sun's yellow light.
     Almost as suddenly, the moon's ruddy mycoric glow gave way to
lifeless   green, as if a flame had guttered and gone out.
     Self-Portrait: Artist on a Bad Day Black, fade to shot of Mulch
System  whirling in the distance, against a huge but indistinct
background of cavern  stone, range indeterminate. Cue music: Thus
Spa/ce Zarathustra, fade,  overlay with Zellinger compose-on-demand
fractal Null Progress. The  effect is jarring, indicative of
malfunction.
     Zoom in on the lrtist, sitting cross-legged in empty space,
surrounded   by palm-sized VR windows apparently fixed with respect to
his sagittal axis.
     His hair unkempt and maybe a bit too long, at odds with the blue
spacer   uniform he wears. On the shoulder, prominent, one service
patch: PASTEUR,   MYCOSYSTEM MISSION ONE. Embroidered beneath the
words, a stylized image of  the ship itself.
     Turn, pan until we are behind the ?artist, then zoom to look over
his  shoulder. Close-up on the windows. Several of these display only
text, green  on black in one of the boxy 24-pin nostalgia fonts, of
which a close  examination reveals sorted lists of cellular automaton
ruks which flicker  one by one, with visible effects mirrored in the
behavior of Mulch System in  the distance and in fragmentary
high-magnification images on the other   windows.
     The artist's fingers intrude, manipulating symbols, popping text
lines   out and moving them to other places. These movements, while
indicative of       frustration, are nonetheless slow and deliberate.
     Cut to an image of the artist's face, tired and annoyed with his
  creation, and with an underlying sadness that seems unrelated, and
then we  pull back rapidly to observe him from greater distance.
     Surrounded by his cloud of flat, rectangular, vanishingly thin
windows, he seems to be following a complex trajectory through Mulch
System.
     Our view of him holds constant as sun and planets whirl about.
Within thirty   seconds the path has begun to repeat, and we see it for
what it is: a figure  eight with the sun at one focus and empty space
at the other, aphelion just   outside the orbit of the fourth planet,
now aswirl with the reds and  yellows of infection.
     Cut to the artist's face, expression unchanged.
     Cut to the windows, two of which now display the images of human
faces.
     Women: one elderly and one in middle-adulthood. Both smiling, but
there   is a sterile quality to the images, and presently they both
fade to two  dimensions, and then to black and white, and then to pure
black. We pull  back slightly to reveal additional windows, giving up
their old images to   present more faces. Men and women this time, and
children, and then aerial   views of old cities, continents, and
finally the planet Earth itself. One by   one, the images flatten and
fade. The artist's fingers intrude, frantically  this time, as if to
interrupt the disappearing process, but no visible  effect is produced.
     Cut to the artist's face, now showing traces of anger.
     Cut to Mulch System, seen from a great distance. The central star
is   the color of ice backlit with yellow.
     Cut to the windows, still black. In the center of each, a tiny
image  resolves: the Protestant cross, a three-dimensional projection
with the   color and texture of wood. No human image is crucified
there.
     Cut to the artist's face. The anger has deepened, and there is now
  skepticism in the expression as well, of the give-me-a-break variety.
He  finds the image insulting, a trivilization.
     Cut to a cartoon image, two-dimensional and brightly colored in
the   style of twentieth-century animators: a flowing-haired,
white-robed  caricature of God, his staff resting on crossed knees,
manipulates lines of  text in a VR window, then checks an image of
Earth in another  window, and nods with satisfaction.
     Artist's face: partly amused, partly accusatory, mostly just
tired  and sad.
     "There is no "up" in this weightless place, but he looks to the
solar   north, perpendicular to the orbits of the planets. He holds up
his hands and   shrugs expectantly, as if to say, Well, does
omnipotence coupled with a   failure to intervene imply disinterest, or
active malice?
     Clearly, the artist holds some complex and unresolved feelings.
Look   angle enables us to see, for the first time, a black armband
around his   left bicep.
     Red glare reflects from his skin as a contaminated planet flashes
by   and we pull back rapidly to reveal a Mulch System flickering out
predictable  patterns, red against green against brown. The compelling
fractal intricacy  of it is gone, replaced with simple iteration as
waves of color circle the       planets over and over, the space
between them empty.
     The music jars discordantly.
     Cartoon image: God, angered, breaking the staff across his knee.
     artist, sitting cross-legged in empty space: his expression now
resigned, weary, stopping just short of bitterness. Mulch System is not
 working, real life is not working, and God is unavailable for comment.
The  windows are scattered beneath the artist, as if on a solid
floor. All  fifteen on them show nothing but static. Pull back slowly.
     The music ends and we... Fade to black.

     TWENTY ONE
     HONOR THY MOTHER

     A little piece of Baucum seemed to have slipped
through  my skin to infect me; upon emergence from my VR hibernation,
not only did I  take over the simplest of her bridge functions, such as
monitoring the  top-level Immune system alarms, but I pestered Wallich
with a series of  detailed questions about the maximum resolving power
of the camera dots  embedded in Louis Pasteurs hull.
     "What's this about?" he finally asked me, impatient because he'd
taken   over several Baucum-tasks as well, in addition to his already
formidable load.
     I shrugged, uncertain how to phrase my reply. I tried: "The Earth
  flyby is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe large-scale TGL
structures in a planetary environment, and possibly signs of human
habitation as well."
     "And you want a closer look?"
     "Absolutely. Don't you?"
     My use of the Immuno-jargon and mind-set must at least have been
adequate, because Wallich sighed and took a minute out to help me put
together a sensor schedule. Really, it was a lot like building cellular
 automaton rules, except that the final result would be real,
nonimaginary  data from a system that actually worked, that actually
kept itself  perpetually out of the twin equilibria of repetition and
death. That had done  so for the last twenty years, anyway.
     Tosca Lehne was still asleep in his cabin, and needed to be fresh
for   the challenges ahead, but Earth was already the size of my
thumbnail-in a 4X  view. An hour before, it had been the size of my
pinkie nail in 10X, and  since that time the hull had logged a hundred
thousand new spores, and seven  replication events. Two of these
occurred in the same square millimeter of  hull and were therefore
cause for suspicion and concern, but Wallich assured       me the
matter could wait for Lehne's attention when he came in.
     Meanwhile, Wallich himself was struggling to plot the courses of
our   five pursuing vessels and their attendant swarm. We really were
going to   press ahead with the probe deployment, and they really were
going to   intervene with lethal force, and so predicting where they
would be and then  arranging to be somewhere else ourselves was a top
priority. They hadn't  gained on us appreciably since Mars, hadn't
seemed even to try all that hard,  but of course our probes could only
stand so much impact force, so much   atmospheric heating, and thus we
were obligated to shed about twenty percent  of our speed in the next
couple of hours, if our deployment was going to be  successful. This
would give the Temples' ships a fine window in which to  pounce. Well,
not pounce, really, so much as fail to slow down when we did.
     They'd close on our vessel with ever-greater relative velocity,
taking  advantage of our distraction, screaming in from behind with
their motors  off, no telltale iron-hydrogen plumes to give them
away...
     "But space is big," Wallich said, not dismissing the threat but
not  surrendering to it, either. "Even close to the planet, even inside
the orbit  of the moon, there's plenty of room to get lost in. To hit
us they need  pinpoint precision; to escape we only need a millimeter.
Less than that,       really, and there are a lot of millimeters out
there."
     "They're not shooting," I pointed out, "they're spraying. You've
said  yourself, it doesn't take much to damage the t-balance." He
grinned. "I       said that?" "Uh-huh."
     "Well, hell, who listens to me?"
     We all did, actually, but I let the point ride. For once Wallich's
good   humor seemed genuine, infectious, and I was inclined to follow
along.
     Rapisardi, alas, did not seem to share the feeling. "We should
simply       escape," he said, a disembodied voice from the engine
room.
     "Should we?" Wallich mused, unfazed. "All right, let's do that.
     But let's put some detectors down while we're at it, right?"
     "You're enjoying this," Rapisardi accused.
     Wallich didn't deny it. "I have more to do, friend. Idle hands do
the   devil's work, which in this case means undermining morale. Have
you checked  the plasma focus capacitance like I asked?"
     "It's eight-twenty mE You're not going to get any sort of killing
 stroke out of that unless the enemy is close enough to spit on."
     "Well, hope springs eternal. You can adjust the focal radius
manually   now, yes?"
     "Yes, but..."
     It went on like that for a while. Evidently there had been some
significant customization of Pasteurs housekeeping and control
software.
     Nothing that could make a warship of her, of course, but it
sounded as  though some routine functions had been subverted to
distinctly non-peaceful  use. We were going, for example, to seed the
path behind us with Rapisardi's  modified probes, now turned to service
as ladderdown space mines. I gathered  this wasn't expected to help, as
the Temples' ships could easily ping the  space ahead of them and steer
appropriately, but the psychological value, to  us and to them, would
be considerable: look here, Pasteur is no  helpless target!
     There were other surprises awaiting our enemies as well, engine
mods   and Immune system mods and even a change to the running and
landing lights.
     I wanted to ask more about these, both for posterity's sake and
for my   own curiosity, but actually I was starting to have my hands
full with   allocation.
     Davenroy's reactor control sims ate a more or less steady diet of
time   and energy, data and memory, but Wallich and Rapisardi were all
over the   place, and the computer, with no insight or understanding of
its own, was   having a hard time sifting priorities. I was intervening
now several times a   minute, throwing this or that item to the bottom
of the queue, or bumping up   job requests that kept getting postponed.
     In a way, too, I was contributing to the morass, because every
time I   let my attention wander over to the bioanalysis functions I'd
find myself   asking questions, the answering of which threw still more
demands on the   allocation system at the very times I wasn't
	there monitoring it. But  I could hardly give the practice uP;
presently, another replication event  ticked over in that same tiny
square of a hull, and then yet another.
     I captured the details of the events as best I could, and thought
hard  about waking Lehne up no matter what Wallich said. I didn't like
this one  bit. But then again, a glance at the chronometer showed I had
only a couple  of minutes to wait before the "natural" start of his
shift. I glanced at  Wallich, who was deeply engrossed in disagreeing
with Rapisardi about       something-or-other, and decided to hold my
peace.
     Time and resource constraints certainly didn't warrant our taking
any  gratuitous science measurements, but I did it anyway, somehow
fitting it in  with all the rest. Not that I really knew what I was
doing, but it sure  seemed like somebody ought to be handling this, and
I, more than anyone else       at least, could be spared for the
effort. Maybe posterity would be   grateful.
     Maybe there'd be a story or two in it for me. Or maybe it was a
flagrant waste of time, but at least the ghost of Baucum would be
silent.
     Murderess or no, she really would have wanted this data, and the
pressure of that want seemed to compel me, somehow, to action.
     I looked "up," though, and noticed Lehne settling into his
station, so   I suspended what I was doing and flashed some key
pointers to his   board.
     "Hi," I said. "There's a hot spot on the hull you need to have a
look  at.
     Five replications so far."
     "Five?" He blanched. "Why didn't you wake me?" "I was about to."
"Hmm."
     He fell into the task with the sort of bone-deep dedication only
mortal  danger can bring. We'd all adopted a sort of business-as-usual
fa˘ade where  blooms were concerned, to save energy if for no other
reason--you simply  can't maintain a state of panic indefinitely. But
the danger was real, and       under other circumstances would
certainly have been kick-and-scream  material.
     Lehne requested additional data, and I provided it. The engines,
I  noted, had come on at some point without my being aware of it, and
behind       me I heard Wallich and Rapisardi talking about going to
"DP-l" attitude.
     Damn, but the time was racing! I glanced up at an exterior window,
saw   the crescent Earth swollen now to very nearly the size of a golf
ball.
     Again, not any Earth I remembered, but a yellow-pink tumble of
technogenic excess, its atmosphere and surface contours blurring out
into  space with dust-bunny vagueness. No sheen of ocean, no ripply
jacket of  continental rock, no sign at all, really, of planet-smooth
surfaces. Except  at the polar caps, which looked much as I supposed
they always had, and as  out of place on that infected globe as
steaming jungles would be on the  surface of Ganymede.
     Still, the sight of them cheered me, reassured me that even this
far   down, the Mycosystem's rule was not absolute. Not yet, anyway.
     I only got a moment to look, because Lehne's work dumped an
additional   burden on the already strained allocation system, which
threatened an  outright collapse if I didn't wade in with some
authoritative instructions.
     But dutifully, thinking of Momma's last-ever request, I waved at
her   homeworld just the same. Had she been younger and more fit, would
she have   volunteered for this expedition? I found it difficult to
imagine otherwise.
     So if there were such things as ghosts, perhaps hers was here as
well,  silently watching the Earth go by. Or bickering with the ghost
of Baucum,  maybe, or feeding rubber to the ghosts of my father's dear
departed  parrots.
     My moment of looking ended. After that, the normal rules of
chronology   were suspended for a while as we dug deeper and deeper
into our instruments   and jobs, communicating only as needed for that
purpose. Then at some point   the flow of time resumed, jarringly.
Louis Pasteur shuddered, and I looked   up sharply frightened for a
moment before I recognized the sound and feel   of payload release.
Rapisardi had opened up tubes five and six, launching   the mines. Or
were they live detectors, destined for the planet's surface?
     No, surely it was still too early for that. But we had only seven
tubes   left to fire, four of which were indispensably vital to our
mission; even   there, at ten probes per tube and one tube per
planetary and lunar pole, we'd  be spreading our resources desperately
thin. Another of Baucum's warning  systems came alive. "We're being
pinged," I said. "Got it," Wallich       agreed.
     I had a window open on our "best guess" courses for the enemy
ships,   whose positions changed suddenly as automated processes
digested the   radar data.
     The ping came again, a red warning light on my board, a shrinking,
 kidney-shaped outline on the threat display. Shrinking again as the
probe  let out another radar yelp, and then contracting to a single
diffuse dot as   the readings changed, optical sensors picking up
glints of sunlight on a   target now dozens of times larger and less
dense.
     The threat of bloom brought home again, made clear, made current
in   minds that had worked hard at forgetting it. Look where I am,
Momma. Look  where the hell I am.
     "I need to purge the hull," Lehne warned.
     Wallich grunted without looking up. "HF sweat?"
     "Don't think so, we're nearly out. Better be a hydroxide wash,
very  alkaline, minimum exposure time."
     "You sure that's wise?"
     "No. All we've got on hand, though..."
     So they went ahead and did it, breaking the process down into four
or   five hardware calls and dumping them into the job queue at maximum
priority.
     It was among the worst things they might possibly have done. I
raised my   voice in protest.., too late. The system, finally
overloaded beyond its   ability to cope, coughed up an error message
and seized. A buzzer sounded,  and red warning lights-physical diodes
on the surfaces of every control  panel--came on. "System crash!" I
shouted. "Damn it!" "Restart!" Wallich  snapped at me.
     No, I wanted to say, really? Is that what we do when the computer
 seizes? But what I actually said was, "Aye, sir, I'm on it."
     On a spaceship of any sort, cycling power on the central processor
is a   big deal. On a spaceship of our sort, in the middle of a battle
in the   middle of a planetary flyby in the middle of the God damn
Mycosystem, it's a   calamity begging to happen. Life support,
propulsion, guidance and nav ...
     everything feeds through the information system. Manual backups
are  available, sure, but to fall back on them you have to trust human
minds and  senses to accomplish feats they simply aren't equipped for.
It's an unspoken  rule, a simple fact of life: without the processor
you're dead.
     I reached for the Main Power switch high on the allocation board,
 flipped up its clear plastic shield, and pressed it. There was a
confirmation   switch in an even less accessible location, up under the
bottom of the  panel, but I found and depressed it by feel, grateful
suddenly for all the  hours of disassembly and reassembly Wallich had
forced on me in recent weeks.
     It came to me that I knew, literally, the position not only of
every  control, but of every screw and wire and circuit block inside
the  thing.
     The lights went out. Absolute silence is as alien aboard a ship as
  freezing vacuum is in a cavern city. Absolute darkness, too, but that
was   mitigated by the zee-spec; exterior windows vanished instantly,
along with  the virtual controls and indicators that comprised most of
the bridge's  working surfaces, the various status windows and
interlinks, and what have  you. The purely internal stuff, though, the
time and date stamp and  direction indicators and personal windows
(e.g., the tiny Mulch System sim,  running solo, isolated from the
ship's computer and still iterating away  slowly in a corner of my
vision) remained, sparing us the awful sense  of having been struck
blind.
     "Sweet God of Mercy!" Sudhir Rapisardi's voice exclaimed
nonetheless.
     Others were echoing the sentiment, and turning on their zee-specs'
  power-hungry work lamps, as I reached for the switches in reverse
order to  bring the power back on. There was no fumbling, no
uncertainty.
     Practice makes perfect.
     You never notice that background hum and whine of electrical
conduits   until the moment it stops, or the moment it starts back up.
Relief washed   over me with that sound, and then as the air blowers
kicked back on I  permitted myself the luxury of being afraid. Of
noticing how afraid I  was, I should say.
     The lights came on grudgingly, first a warm glow here and there
and   then washes of color as circuits closed and capacitors charged
up. A small   window opened in the exact center of the allocation
board, short and wide and   full of text: 	SYSTM 	RSTRT: 	SCANNING
FUNCTION SPACE 	SYSTM 	RSTRT: LOADING  DSCRPTOR STACK 	SYSTM 	START:
	ALLOCTNG FUNCTION SPACE OPR. CMPLTE:  	00:02:26.81
     "Report," Wallich demanded quietly.
     "Two and a half minutes to system restore," I answered.
     He paused for a moment, fitting appropriate words around his next
 question: "How... did this happen to us?"
     "Task loading," I said simply. "The allocation system juggles a
hundred   jobs just sitting there, and we kept throwing more crap at
it. Processing   capacity is not infinite, and I don't think the ship
was really designed to  do most of the stuff we're asking of it right
now."
     He paused again, and then said, "This can't happen again. I mean
it.
     Preventive measures?"
     Half the lights still hadn't come on, the control panels were
still   dead, and in the strange lighting I took several seconds to
realize he was  still looking at me. The fact that he was behind me and
upside down didn't   help my recognition any.
     I considered the question for a moment. Loss of the information
system   had, I think, hurled us into a kind of freezing panic, a sense
that our jobs   were going undone while dangers piled up outside the
hull, and if we didn't   do something right now we'd.., what? Panic's
most dangerous seduction is its       cool mimicry of logic, its quiet
insistence on sudden, inappropriate  action.
     But there are other forces at work in a human mind, in a trained
mind,   and there come points in your life when you're faced with an
unfamiliar   task, an unfamiliar decision, and you realize you're it,
you're on the hook,   you're the one and only person in a position to
set things right.
     Flash of childhood memory: a game of Capture the Flag, the enemy
pinned   down by laser fire, hit sensors screaming back there among the
trees, the   gym teacher turning to me in exasperation. "Get theflag,
John." The   implication clear in his voice: you're good enough, you're
fast enough,  you're bloody well it, so what's the holdup? Go, go!
     I went.
     "Captain," I said, "you can't keep shunting your trajectory
calculations onto shipboard processors. That goes for everyone--if you
can  solve a problem locally, do it. A zee-spec isn't that slow, and it
hasn't  got a whole ship to run in its spare time. Push-pull windows
are fine, but  be careful that what you're pushing is static data and
not incomplete  calculation blocks.
     Especially blocks with timers on them. Also--please!--don't force
the  priority flag on your requests. All that does is tell the ship
that  everything is more important than everything else, which is
meaningless. Let  the priority queue do its job, and let me do mine."
     Shockingly, Wallich laughed. "Well said, berichter. Anything
else?"
     "Well, not really, except to use common sense. Your brain is for
thinking, and your zee is for calculating. The ship is just an I/O
device."
     Wallich laughed again, longer and harder this time. And then he
stopped.
     "Time to full function?"
     "Eighty seconds."
     "Well. Damn. It's hard just to sit here, eh?"
     Nobody commented. It was the understatement of the week. "Status?"
  "Forty seconds."
     "Lehne, that alkaline sweat is your top priority. Davenroy, I want
  reaction control thrusters just as soon as possible. We're going to
Deploy  One attitude in a few minutes and any schedule slip means we
slow down   even more.
     Nobody wants that, right? Strasheim: status."
     "Twenty seconds, sir, and this is exactly what I'm talking about.
     You've got a timer hanging right in front of your face. Also, I
think we  should stagger our initial jobs on five-second intervals to
give the system  a chance to adjust. We could go bow-to-stern, so
Lehne's request goes  in first."
     "Okay," Wallich said with manic amusement, "you heard the man.
Start   your clock when he says go."
     The control panels came back to life. There were grunts and sighs
of   relief, the sounds of people opening windows and getting back to
work,  hitting the allocation system one by one, but not as hard as
before. Not  quite. The first coherent thing I heard was Lehne's voice
cursing softly,  and then the words: "Stands to reason we'd encounter
novel species down  here. Close to the sun, close to the planet. Stands
to reason we'd not  be prepared for every possible thing."
     "What?" Wallich asked, his voice still tight and giddy. "Spores
eating       through the hull?"
     "Yes, sir," Lehne replied, "I'm afraid they are."
     Slowly, he forgot to say. Initial panic gave way to a much slower,
  deeper sense of dread as the unknown mycorum, still restricted to a
tiny  patch of hull, gradually blunted the t-balance defenses there,
stripping  them away uncertainly, atom by atom, to feed its own
bottomless appetite.
     Replication events were soon too frequent to draw comment. They
had  become a fact of life, of which, according to Lehne's
calculations, we had  about six days left. That's painfully slow for a
bloom, I'll agree, but  painfully quick for a sentence of death. Once
we lost hull integrity, we'd  be patching holes and fighting blooms and
trying to hold the ship's systems  together for another few precious
moments, and it didn't really matter what  got us first, because
something surely would.
     The good news was that Lehne was able to push the deadline back a
day   and a half by sweating out the last of our hydrofluoric acid. So
we had a   whole week to live, if nothing else went wrong. Which was
about as   likely as ever.
     Still hard on our tail, the enemy ships closed alarmingly as we
fired   our last deceleration burn. They seemed to have misjudged,
though--the   closure was not quite fast enough to bring them to us
before deployment time.
     Had they misjudged our maximum deployment speed? Presumed we'd be
following the same profile we had at Mars? If so, the error was a
critical one; they were still lagging by thousands of kilometers as we
spun and  danced, shooting payload tubes seven and eight off at Earth's
north pole,  nine and ten at its south, and then two more at the poles
of Luna.
     Leaving only the final tube: lucky thirteen. If we fired that,
we'd be   left with no more bombs to shoot, no more mines to lay. From
there on, we'd   be relying on the really improvised weapons. In a way,
the notion was almost       charming.
     We passed right between Earth and Luna, slashing through cobwebby
 filaments of mycostructure that seemed almost to connect the two
bodies. As  they passed into full sunlight, showing off their round
faces to us, it was  hard not to stare, mesmerized, looking for some
familiar detail. We'd all  been here only two decades before. Could
whole worlds be erased in twenty  years?
     Apparently so. The moon was like a yellow-white sea sponge, its
deficient chemistry supporting only silicate lebenforms and yet still
riotously alive, shot through with fibers and voids, recursive with
fractal  structures that hurt to look at, punishing the eye that
lingered too long.
     The "radar surface" of the planet, Wallich said, was some eight
hundred  kilometers higher than the virgin regolith had been, back in
our moon-base  days. That's a lot of expansion for a body that small.
"The moon," he said,  "has become a cheese puff. Not only would it
float in water, it would  dissolve."
     "Latent organophilic spores," Lehne countered, "would consume the
 water. Not float in it. Not dissolve."
     Wallich waved a dismissive hand. "Whatever. It's a puff."
     As for the Earth itself, it resembled nothing so much as the back
of   some monstrous caterpillar. Horned, fuzzy, its surface undulating
with a   speed that, while not directly apparent to the eye, brought
visible changes   between one hurried glance and the next. I could see
pockets of atmosphere  clinging all around, but in places the landscape
shot right out of it, narrow  translucent peaks jutting far out into
space. Peaks? Tentacles, maybe--they  too waved back and forth in
sluggish progression.
     Tasting the vacuum of space, the sizzle of solar wind, the tenuous
 mycostructure drifting all around? Reaching for us, feeling for us?
     Well, maybe. My instrument readings showed a spreading cone of
disaster  in Louis Pasteu?s wake, shattered mycofilaments spilling
apart into angry   clouds, but if the planet itself was aware of our
passage, it gave  little sign.
     Not so the enemy ships; they pinged and pinged at us, closing the
gap   but seeming frantic, enraged. Our lead, slender as it was, had
proved   sufficient to foil their primary mission of keeping us away
from here,  keeping us from deploying our little spies. Even now, the
detectors were  probably striking the surface of Luna, screaming down
through the  atmosphere of Mother Earth.
     Some would no doubt shatter or burn--we were right at the maximum
 deployment speed--but the devices, Rapisardi insisted, were tough.
They  had to be.
     Funny how the rush of completing our mission had whizzed right by
me.
     We were done. We were free to leave, to fire up the engines and
blast  straight for home. Or try, anyway.
     The Temples' ships, alas, had other ideas. It seemed they had a
backup   plan, a secondary mission to punish us for our supposed crime.
They hadn't   got close enough yet to spray, or shoot, or whatever the
hell it was they   were going to do, but sooner or later we would have
to change course,   and then...
     "At this point," Wallich said with admirable reserve, "our basic
options are to stop and fight, which seems sort of pointless, or to
turn back  up and run for home, which seems, well, overly optimistic
for a number of  reasons. We're not licked yet, though; the other
option is to turn down and  head for the sun. The lower border of the
Mycosystem is a hell of a lot  closer than the upper one right now."
"Won't we melt?" I asked,  horrified.
     He shrugged. "Down between the orbits of Venus and Mercury, that's
  where TGL starts to fry. It's hot down there, yeah, but we should be
able to  cook all the crap off us before the ship actually starts to
come  apart."
     A window opened up, showing Davenroy's face. "What about
radiation?"
     "A bigger threat," Wallich admitted. His hands fluttered, jabbing
and  pointing. "We're close to solar minimum right now, but if we pick
up a mag  storm then yeah, it's all over. Cosmic ray shielding is not
going to hold up       against a proton flare at that range."
     "We don't get these lebenforms off the hull, it's all academic,"
Lehne  said.
     "I say we go. Sterilize. Then figure out what to do next."
     "We may not have enough fuel to return home," Davenroy pointed
out. She   did some fidgeting and pointing of her own. "Well, maybe
enough to reach the       Gladholds. It'll be close."
     "Will the Temples' ships follow us down?" Rapisardi asked. He was
still   a disembodied voice, which for some reason I found strikingly
annoying at   that moment.
     "Only one way to find out," Wallich said, grinning and chuckling
in  that way of his. "Are we all on board for this? Are we 'go'?"
     "Affirmative," Lehne said without hesitation.
     Rapisardi's affirmation followed close behind, and then, more
reluctantly, Davenroy's. Wallich turned to me. "Well, berichter, what
do you  say?
     We'll be closer to the sun than anyone's ever gone before. Closer
even  than those poor bastards on Venus. Hell of a story, that."
     I snorted, trying to be amused. "We've already got a hell of a
  story, Darren. I was sort of hoping to take it home now and show it
off."
     He reached a hand up and nudged the back of my seat's headrest.
"Come   on, let's go to the sun. It'll be fun."
     Fun? Well, maybe it would at that. More fun than certain death,
anyway.
     "What the hell," I said.
     And down we went.
     The Temples' zealots, only momentarily thrown off by the change of
      trajectory, followed us in. Of course.

     TWENTY TWO
     HEART OF BRIGHTNESS

     So where does all this leave us? Which of the
available futures will we choose for ourselves? To sail away on bright
starship flames, leaving our birthplace to rot in peace? To carry the
fight  downward, extending the Immunity's reach into the Gladhold and
beyond? Or  will we continue to cower here under the ice,
waiting patiently for the  other shoe to drop?
     This much we know; that it isn't simply our lives at stake, but
the   very biology that supports them.

     from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure © 2101 by John Strasheim

     Mulch System swept around me, taking advantage of reduced demands
on   the information system, running now at maximum speed, its
movements blurring  into irregular spasms like the innards of some
enormous   hyperventilating animal.
     Running unheeded--every couple of minutes it would freeze or die
out or   lock into an infinite loop, and I would glance up and, with a
manual   flourish, cast a dozen or a hundred or a million new spores
into the fray,   bringing it temporarily back to life. Other than that,
though, I pretty  well ignored it.
     I was reading my mail.
     Slow data rates or no, I'd been inattentive this past week, and
the   messages had really begun to pile up. Many seemed happily unaware
of our   difficulties, e.g.: Dear Strasheim, please send pictures of
the Earth you  know we all miss it very much. I will look forward to
meeting you when you  return to the Immunity, I hope you will agree to
visit Callisto we don't all  live in Ganymede you know...
     Others seemed merely to have got delayed, looping for God knows
how   long in some glitchy network before escaping to a transmission
queue: J.S.:  Good luck entering Mycosystem. Please inform crew our
thoughts gowith.
     History will mark your courage this day. Live people in Mycosystem
? Surely  some error in Gladholder science. Soon you will know, though,
yes?
     Well, sadly, no. Even with all the computer trouble, I had managed
to   capture some decent images and science readings during the flyby,
but Louis   pasteurs camera dots simply didn't have the resolution to
pick up  surface features.
     Nothing smaller than a good-sized city, anyway, and if there were
any  of those about, my pictures gave no evidence. Just these ropy,
snaky,  cloud-diffuse images of a complexity that brought a woozy,
stood-too-quickly  feeling to my head. Images in the ultraviolet were
the worst.
     Were there people down there among those headache whorls? Had they
seen   us go by, a brightish star across the nightscape, with lesser
lights swarming   after it in pursuit? Had they seen the meteor trails
of our detectors  raining down on the polar caps? The Glad-holder
findings were still  difficult to accept, equally difficult to refute.
It seemed natural enough  that, yeah, we should somehow be able to
gauge the truth of the matter down  here, but I guessed there was a
limit to what five beleaguered people in a  failing boat could
accomplish. Maybe next time, friend.
     Still other messages were profoundly clueless, perhaps written by
 children (although years of experience had taught me to be wary of
that   assumption), and some seemed to have been addressed to another
reality   altogether.
     Charitably, they might somehow have been mangled in transit. A few
  messages, though, seemed to target my own thoughts with precision:
Pasteur:  Temples deny foreknowledge, blame splinter group for
attacking ships. So your  assessment of enemy identity appears largely
correct.
     Trying to negotiate, they say, but more blooms, turmoil here.
Details  unimportant--mission accomplished. Good luck inner system. Do
not bring back  souvenir/ Pasteur: Spacecom advises, consider
trajectory carefully viz. fuel.
     Dub. Stay well. Have tried thermal cycling to foil infection ?
Immunity   recommends as treatment last resort.
     Pasteur: Housekeeping tip, increase atmospheric C02 & H20 to slow
 metabolism, reduce food intake. Plan now, avert shortage; mission
duration  not known. Remember to note what it's like down there; do not
forget  you are pioneers.
     We'd been losing the originator info on all the messages lately,
so it   was hard to say who was sending these. I might almost have
suspected Vaclav  Lottick, the messages were so clueful and direct, but
he'd always addressed  his queries and orders and complaints to
Wallich. I suspected I'd stopped       existing for him the moment I
shook his hand in the shipyards at Galileo.
     Something in the clipped, precise style of the messages reminded
me of   fellow berichter Warren An-cell, but he and I had never really
gotten   along. Had we?
     I resolved to investigate the matter if I ever returned home.
Somebody   was definitely owed a night on the town, and overtime be
damned. I would   have liked to reply, even just a couple of bytes of
feedback for that   welcome voice, and for the folks back home who'd
made us a part of their  lives, but the rest of the crew had ganged up
to force my agreement in  switching the transmitters off.
     "Loss of countermeasure reserves," Lehne had said. "Why risk
making   things worse? We can still heat the hull, okay, fine, but on
the down cycle,  residual warmth just accelerates growth. Marginal net
gain, and we risk  attention from active mycostructures. Tickle the
spores with radio waves,       that's not going to help one bit."
     "Anyway," Wallich added, "why give the Temples a fix on our
position?
     For once we've got the advantage: we see the sunlight reflecting
off  them, brighter every day, while they're looking almost straight
down the   corona to see us. We want to stay lost in the glare if we
can help it."
     And Rapisardi: "I'd have to cut your data ration anyway, due to
the   increase in range."
     "Plus it drains the battery," Davenroy had concluded. And that was
  that.
     Anyway, it seemed there wasn't that much mail after all. Scanning
  plaintext was a lot faster than wading through audiovisual
recordings, that  was for sure. Suddenly bored, I waved the mail window
closed, and then  exited from Mulch System, back into my cabin. Well,
of course, I'd been in  the cabin all along. The sensation of having
traveled somehow was difficult  to shake, though; the ideator's VR can
be a very real place if you let it,  which is probably why we Munies
avoid it so assiduously.
     Not long before that day, the cabins had been guarded territory,
closed   doors marking off the boundaries of a largely illusory
privacy. Since the   Earth flyby, though, some strange, unspoken
consensus had been reached that   the doors would mostly remain open.
We were, in all probability, going to   die together in the next few
days, and against the terrible intimacy of   that, it seemed absurd to
hide behind walls just to sleep and scratch  ourselves and whatnot.
     So once my zee-spec lenses had gone transparent, I could see clear
  across the wardroom into Rapisardi's cabin. He, too, seemed lost in
VR  somewhere; he was angled at forty-five degrees to my vertical, and
facing  the side of his cabin rather than the doorway, but from what I
could see his  eyes looked fixed on distant objects. His hands wandered
through the  air, doing God knows what.
     Not working equations, certainly. Maybe it was a dance.
     There's sometimes a delayed reaction to reality on emergence from
VR;   the colors aren't quite as bright, the sounds not quite as crisp,
and the   brain can be surprisingly reluctant to accept the degradation
as anything   other than a mistake) But then your vision and hearing
synch up with the  other senses, smell and touch and taste and balance,
and the subtler ones.
     	This phenomenon also turns out to have an ugly technical term
attached:  "simulator lag."
     like proporesis, your limbs' perception of their own positions,
and   suddenly the intensity of it all hits you like a drug, and you
get this   tremendous urge to interact. Especially with people still in
the VR, who  haven't yet shared your rush.
     This is my long-winded way of saying I felt like talking to
Rapisardi,   and didn't mind disturbing him to do it.
     "What are you reading?" I called out to him in a loud voice. "Hey,
  Sudhir."
     He looked around blindly for a moment.
     "Sudhir."
     Resignedly, he motioned windows closed, turned to face me. "What
are   you reading?" I asked again.
     "Oh. Well. It's a ... Well, it's a sim I'm writing." He looked
embarrassed.
     "Ideation?" I asked with a conspiratorial smile.
     The suggestion appeared to make him uncomfortable. "It's not that,
no.
     Architecture, I suppose you could say. I'm hypothesizing, well, a
     null-gravity city."
     "What, in orbit or something?"
     "Yes, very high orbit, either around Jupiter or around the sun.
The   idea being to minimize gravitational gradient. For true
micro-gravity, you       understand?"
     I didn't, but I nodded anyway, encouraging him to go on.
     He still looked embarrassed. "Well, you know, I got the idea in
Saint  Helier.
     Three centigee is not much, but even that minimal gravity had
forced  innumerable design compromises. In true micro-gravity the place
could have  looked like the inside of a stomach, wrinkled and folded
back on itself many  times, for, you see, maximum usable surface area.
Ceilings are such a       frightful waste."
     "So you're doing away with them," I said, politely amused. "You
think   people will want to live that way?"
     He seemed to shrink back into himself. "It's just an amusement,
friend. Some people might choose it, yes, but irrelevantly, because no
one is going to build this city. I'm simply bored."
     "Build it yourself," said Darren Wallich.
     Rapisardi and I turned to see him filling the hatchway between
bridge   and wardroom.
     "Pardon?" said Rapisardi.
     "Build it yourself," Wallich repeated. "If we ever get back home,
it's   not inevitable that we fall back into our old ruts. You could
change   careers, become a city planner. Put some finance together, who
knows  what you could accomplish?"
     "The Immunity needs me."
     Wallich laughed. "The Immunity is getting along without you right
now,       friend. They'll manage."
     "Do you plan to change jobs?" I asked him.
     He frowned, rolled his tongue around inside his mouth for a few
moments.
     "Well, that would be tough to say. I've never been sure exactly
what my   job is."
     "Doctor?" I prompted. "Technical lead? Spaceship captain?" "Hell,
I've   done a lot more than just that."
     Looking at his expression when he said that, not grouchy or
boastful   but just sort of quietly self-satisfied, I felt a stab of
envy. Since I was   fifteen, Immune society had never found any use for
me outside the shoe  factory.
     As if running a paste-and-stitch press were somehow my only
talent? And  then I blinked, remembering where I was. Oh yeah. Mission
correspondent.
     Lucky me: I had one other talent, and it had brought me here.
     Wallich, who was of course only about two meters away, caught
something   in my expression then. He must have interpreted it pretty
well, because what   he said was, "You know I've been meaning to
say, Strasheim, you  did an okay job back there. You might just have a
future crewing  spaceships."
     I snorted. "Lucky me. I'm having so much fun on this little
expedition   of yours. Thank you, though. The sentiment is ...
appreciated.
     I'm afraid I've been seriously neglecting my other job."
     He shrugged. "No transmitter."
     "No, but I can still record. I brought along fifty blank slates in
my       personal baggage, and so far I've only used twelve."
     Wallich leaned back, crossed his arms. "Okay, we'll use the rest
of  them.
     What'd you have in mind?"
     "Well, I've interviewed every member of the crew but you. Would
you   mind answering a couple of questions?"
     "Are you recording right now?"
     I wished he hadn't asked that; his whole manner changed, going
stiff and  self-conscious and distinctly nonphotogenic. Playing to the
cameras was one  thing when he had a job to hide behind, quite another
when he was simply  supposed to be himself. I knew the syndrome well.
Thinking it best to disarm  him now, I said, "Don't worry, I'll block
out the face to protect your       identity."
     He laughed, relaxing a little. "Yeah, great. Sure, okay, I'll
answer   some questions. I was born in Maine, Evacuated right after my
twenty-eighth  birthday. Spent five years as a busboy and five more as
a bartender before       the sky fell down."
     "Really? I wouldn't have expected that."
     "What, bartending? I used to love it. You spent a lot of time with
your   hands wet, washing glasses and stuff, but people just loved you.
Everyone   loves a bartender. Even teetotalers. I was working my way
through  school, though.
     Wasn't going to do it forever."
     "What did you expect to do instead?"
     He frowned again. "You know, I'm not really sure. In the last few
  years, there, job descriptions had gotten sort of surreal.
Bioprogrammer,   system reductivist, stuff like that. But I was
majoring in organic   chemistry."
     "Convenient," I said.
     "Not really. Half my class were stoned to death in the riots."
"Oh. I'm       sorry."
     He laughed. "Yeah, poor me. Truth be told, I haven't thought about
that   stuff in years; it was sort of lost in the shuffle at Evacuation
time. I   figured out early that things weren't getting any better, so
I packed a bag  and drove six hours to the spaceport. Didn't even call
my parents. I was one  of the first thousand Evacuees, so early that
there were still empty seats  on my flight."
     I waved a hand at him, indicating that that was about enough on
the  Evacuation. We all had our sad tales to tell, and nobody much
wanted to  listen. Hope for the future, that was what people tuned in
for. That and  bedroom scandal. I switched gears abruptly: "When did
you have the tickle       capacitor implanted? And why? That must still
be a very rare procedure."
     "It is," he agreed, laugh lines creasing deeply. "There've only
been   five, of which I was second. Happened four years ago. As for
why, all I can  say is people respond to me better this way." He
grinned broadly. "I feel   better, too."
     Time to take a risk. "You must know how annoying it is at times.
Does   it bother you?"
     This time his laugh was sly. "Sure. But I could say and do the
exact   same things my old way, and I assure you, you'd be a lot more
annoyed. Some   people are just born without a funny bone, and the
world is not sympathetic.
     So I took matters into my own hands."
     "That's a very enlightened stance," I said sincerely. "I'm sure a
lot  of people would just have blamed the world and gone about their
    business."
     "I'm sure a lot of people do," he agreed.
     "So what does it feel like? Has your whole personality changed?"
He   shook his head. "No, I'm exactly the same inside. It feels almost
exactly the   same as being tickled. It isn't funny, per se, but it
makes it a lot easier  to laugh at other things. I'm poised on the
brink of it all the time."
     "Don't you get used to that, eventually?"
     "Nope. The unit works on multiple overlapping cycles, so at a
given   time I never know what the sensation level is going to be. If
I'm in a bad   enough mood the unit can sometimes exacerbate it, like
when you punch people   out for trying to cheer you up, but I always
have the option of disabling it.
     I don't suppose it's much like a real sense of humor, but it gets
me  by."
     He snickered, as if at some private thought.
     "What's the first thing you're going to do," I asked, "if you ever
get   back home?"
     "The first? Decontamination." "Well, okay, the second."
"Qgarantine."
     I chuckled with him. "All right, look, you've been released and
you're   out on the street and you're a totally free man. You can do
whatever you  want. So what do you choose?"
     "The tavern," Rapisardi called out.
     Wallich smiled. "Tavern. Hmm. Actually, I think I'd take a nice
hot   bath, dress up in my fanciest clothes, and head straight for
work. It just   kills me, thinking how mucked up things must be getting
back there   without me."
     "So much for not falling into the old ruts."

     "Well, yeah. But I do like my work, you have to remember."
"Because   it's important?"
     He laughed. "Because I am, I think."
     "Aha," I said, pouncing on that. "The truth at last: we have a
powermonger in our midst. Does it please you to boss people around?"
     "Oh, immensely," he said, and winked.
     "Great," I acknowledged, in my this is the end of the interview tone.
     "Well, that was very helpful. Thank you very much."
     "Is that it?" he asked, surprised.
     "For now, yeah. It usually works out better if I ask questions in
 multiple sittings. I get more spontaneity that way. The viewers like
it,   anyway."
     Plus, this didn't seem to be heading in a particularly exciting
direction.
     I'd try him again in a different, less reflective mood.
     "Well, hell," Wallich said, still grinning, "I could have mailed
you   that stuff. Ask me something hard."
     "Well, all right, one more. What do you think is going on with
this  mission?
     Why do you think all this stuff is happening to us?"
     That gave him pause. He clucked a few times, then said, slowly,
"There's nothing like a mystery to bring out the extremes in people.
Whatever   you don't know, well, people just fill that in with whatever
they want most   to believe. In a way, it's the classic problem
pioneers have always   faced--every mystery we strip away knocks over
one more superstition, one  more convenient or comforting belief, and
are people grateful about that?
     Not the ones that stand to lose from it."
     "So you think this is all about money? Or power?"
     "Well, probably not as simple as that. The Immunity's applecart is
a  precarious load, and I guess people aren't eager to see it tipped,
even for  a good cause."
     "I see. Can I quote you on that, next time we see Lottick?"
     He laughed.
     Jenna Davenroy, who had appeared in the engine room hatchway,
spoke up:       "Let's go back to the part about him being annoying."
     We all laughed at that, until Lehne, whose sleeping feet stuck
partway   out his cabin door, growled for us to quiet down, at which
point we laughed   all the harder.
     I suppose it seems sort of shocking in retrospect, all of us
sitting   around like that, not minding the ship. That's the one
advantage of running   out of options, I guess: when anything you do is
more likely to hurt than   help, goofing off becomes a pretty viable
plan.
     Not to mention an okay way to spend your final hours, much better
then       working yourself--literally--to death.
     Later that day, Lehne and I were on the bridge. There wasn't much
to do  except watch the hull slowly erode, which was a lot like
watching grass   grow, but the outside view, at least, had changed.
Transient megastructures   seemed to be features mainly of the upper
Mycosystem; down here the bulk of   our encounters were with objects
Lehne called "Veller bodies"--tangled   strands of TGL structure a
thousand kilometers long, ten or fifty or a  hundred wide, with long
tails pointed down at the sun and wispy, flowerlike   appendages
pointed up at interplanetary space. At any given time there were
hundreds of these things visible, transparent as smoke but glowing
spectrally  in the sunlight, and if you caught one just right, the
stars shining through   it would turn into patterns of little white
rings.
     Every now and then, a petal would break off one of the flowers and
 tumble--very, very slowly--in the general direction of up. I asked
Lehne if these would go on to become trans-megs, but he denied it.
     "Melt away in an hour," he said. "Ten trillion little solar sails
 pushing data spore packages. Some of them might link up again later.
Probably   will, but the trans-megs supposedly accrete mostly from
material  falling down.
     Spores, dust, comets ... Doesn't take more than a couple of
inner-system passes to ablate comets away to nothing, brake the
constituents  with light pressure. Nothing escapes but spores; net mass
transfer is  downward.
     Over geologic time, this should prove significant."
     Hmm.
     From the wardroom, I thought I heard Davenroy's voice, grunting
loudly   about something.
     Fiddling with camera dots, I managed to pull up an image of Venus,
  whose orbit we would shortly be crossing. The planet was nowhere near
us,   fully forty degrees ahead in its orbit, but it hadn't slipped
behind the sun,   and wouldn't if we stayed on this trajectory, and I
was aware that our   current vantage gave us a full fifty percent view
of the daylit planet. From   above, from the Immunity or the Gladholds,
the planet would never appear as   anything more than a sliver, so the
opportunity was unique, and worth taking   advantage of.
     The image was blurry, highly magnified, highly filtered. I found
myself  grateful for this, because I didn't at all like what I saw. If
Earth was a  basketball covered in moss, well, Venus was covered in
marbles and golf   balls and dinner forks, and mold. Barely resembling
a sphere, it looked more   like some sort of virus or bacillus or
unusually lumpy protozoan than a   planet. I found myself with fresh
questions about the Gladholder telescope   image--it had shown an
expanse of flat ground surrounded by towering jungle,  and here I saw
nothing like that. If there were humans down there, in all       that
lumpy fog and slime, I couldn't imagine where they might be   standing.
     "Gravity'd crush those structures," Lehne noted, "if they weren't
so  light.
     Hard to imagine. Maybe it all started on Earth. Probably did. But
this   is the heart of it, right here. Warm, bright, plenty of raw
material ...
     Planet's almost the size of Neptune these days.
     Used to be the size of Earth. Mass hasn't changed."
     Hmm.
     "Where are the people," I asked.
     I hadn't expected an answer, but he'd pasted the image on the same
spot   of wall that I had, and he pointed to it, indicating a crease
where two of  the great lumps came together. "Here," he said. "Really?
     How do you know?"
     "Coordinates the Gladholders gave. It's in your own report. Been a
  couple of weeks, though; might have changed quite a bit since then."
     The mind boggled. Even these enormous structures were fleeting in
 nature, yes, rising like bubbles from the planet's tarry surface,
swelling,   bursting, swelling again as the weeks rolled past. Behavior
that seemed  ordered, even planned, but was in fact built up through
waves of individual,   disconnected, microscopic action. "Emergent
behavior," Baucum had called it.
     There were features like that in Mulch System, too, sun bonnets
and twig  cutters and a dozen other repeating structures, far more
intricate than the  gliders and flashes of Conway's Game of Life and
yet rising up in exactly  the same way, over and over again until the
simulation shuddered to a  halt.
     But Venus was real. No reset button, no variable parameters. Those
  bubbles, some nearly the size of Ganymede, were at least as solid and
 physical as the sun's corona, that superheated atmosphere crisscrossed
with  lines of magnetic force which, even with the solar disc occluded,
was easily  the brightest object in the sky.
     Good old Sun. There was one thing the mycora couldn't eat, sure
enough, and if anything was going to save our lives this week, that
ball of  fusion heat was it. We'd be skirting just below the orbit of
Mercury,  sweeping south of the solar equator on a trajectory that
would pop us, after  a couple of engine burns, right out of the
ecliptic plane, where (Wallich  said) nine-hundred ninety-nine thousand
nine hundred ninety-nine  one-millionths of the Mycosystem's mass was
concentrated, and into the much  sparser medium of Northern Space. Our
momentum would then carry us, over a  period of months, back to the
ecliptic plane somewhere above the orbit of  Mars, and if all went well
we would fire our motors with sufficient impulse  to bring us back into
plane permanently, and circularize the orbit to  prevent our tumbling
right back into the Mycosystem.
     If all went well.
     I checked the threat window, saw the enemy ships' estimated ranges
  marching steadily downward. Must have fired their engines again, put
on even   greater speed. Did their plans--or their fuel supply--leave
any possibility  for their own survival? Certainly, Baucum's example
showed a blunt  willingness to die, and it looked like they weren't
going to repeat their  earlier mistake, giving us a chance to pull some
unexpected maneuver and  slip once more from their grasp. Too, their
weapons--at least the ones we'd  seen--relied on the Mycosystem itself
to do the dirty work, so they were not  going to let us cross the heat
barrier. They were going to catch us just as  early as they could. They
were going to catch us--I crunched some  numbers--in a little over six
hours.
     Somehow, it was comforting to have a figure.
     "They're going to catch us tomorrow morning," I said to Lehne.
"Yup,"   he agreed.
     "Been nice knowing you, I guess."
     He shook his head. "Not over yet. Got off Earth, didn't you?
     Got back down here, made it this far. That makes you one of the
luckiest people that ever lived, so keep it in mind. Me, I plan on
getting home."
     I had to admire the sentiment, if not the rigor of the supporting
 logic. "Do you have a picture of your family?" I asked, struck with
the  sudden desire to see the faces that inspired such optimism.
     "Sure." He poked the air between us, slid a finger sideways. My
receiving light came on and the picture appeared, compressed to an icon
in my       lower-right quadrant.
     I opened it, and the family appeared in a larger window,
three-dimensional and fully colored behind the cartoon frame, but
static,  unmoving as statues, their smiles frozen. Funny, I'd hardly
ever seen Tosca  Lehne smile, but there in the picture he looked about
as happy as I've ever  seen anyone look, not posed or stagey but
caught, it seemed, in the middle  of a funny story.
     He faced forward, shoulders square, confronting the world
directly. His   wife stood in front, nearly facing him with her body
but looking over one   shoulder at the camera. She wasn't pretty,
exactly, but she had a round, kind   face that appealed in less
superficial ways. DORIS EL^NV., the annotation   named her. The gleam
of love was there in her eyes, subtle but quite   unmistakable.
     One of her hands rested lightly on her husband's chest, the other
on   the shoulder of the boy, FRANK TOSCA, standing between them. Two
years   old? Four?
     I'd long ago lost my ability to figure the ages of children, but
this   one appeared slightly bored, slightly irritated, shrinking away
a bit from   his mother's hand. His eyes were on something behind me,
something not   terribly interesting, but I saw he was leaning
backward, putting weight  against the warmth of his parents' bodies.
They had all dressed up for the   occasion, in flimsy, uncomfortable
clothes of the sort people almost never  wore in the Immunity. But they
looked nice.
     It was, in all, a perfectly ordinary holograph, of the sort you
used   to see all the time. Most of human nature, I think, is
encapsulated in   pictures like these.
     "I can see why you're eager to live," I said.
     He smiled at the compliment. "You worry too much, Strasheim. There
are  patterns in life. Not everything happens for a purpose, but
purpose arises  from the things that happen. Key is to blend yourself
with patterns that       include the things you want. That's called
happiness."
     Hmm. I'd have to think about that. I closed the family portrait
and   looked back at Venus, at the patterns and purposes unfolding
there. I   wondered, not for the first time, why Wallich wasn't up here
admiring the  view with us. Not that he couldn't do just as well from
his cabin, I  supposed, but it was so much easier when you had direct
access to the  controls...
     But then Davenroy's voice drifted forward again, groaning,
yelping,   louder than before and twice as difficult to ignore, and
suddenly I knew what       Wallich was up to.
     "You want to play some chess?" I asked Lehne.
     He agreed, then proceeded to flatten me four games out of four.
"You   want to try a different game?" he finally asked, not apologetic
or   condescending, just making the offer.
     "Do you know 'Twenty questions'?"
     "Heard of it."
     "Think of a word or object."
     "Okay."
     "Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?" He shrugged. "Neither." "Is
it a       mycorum?" "Yes."
     I sighed. "Maybe we don't have to play a game. We could just sit
here   and.., appreciate being alive."
     "Suits me," Lehne said, and so for a while that was exactly what
we did.
     Until a red URGENT MESSAGE light flashed on my zeespec, that is,
and Sudhir  Rapisardi's face appeared center screen, looking stricken.
     "We have a problem," he said. "A big one. I think the Temples of
Transcendent Evolution have maybe been correct all along!"

     TWENTY THREE
     THE VECTOR TO HELL

     I wasn't at all sure
what  to make of a comment like that. The Temples were right? Right
about what,  about killing innocent people? "Right about what?" Lehne
asked.
     Rapisardi's face flushed darker. "After Strasheim teased me about
 ideation, I decided I really should go back and do some real work. It
bothered me that I had such an easy time making weapons from those
detectors. Just a simple code change! It really shouldn't have been
that  easy, and there were parts of the code that I didn't personally
geek. Some  other people, some of Lottick's people, stepped in to
customize it for  compatibility with Louis Pasteus control systems.
That was where I found it.
     Listen, an inversion of the ladderdown function about the B-axis
will turn  the field inside out--that's what makes a bomb--and I found
that two of the  landing control system's feedback loops could be
adjusted to interfere  constructively, in a way that would produce
exactly this effect." "I'm not       sure I understand," I said.
     He waved his hands impatiently. "When the detectors do their
thing,   logging a replication event, these loops will creep closer
into phase. After   fifty events, enough to be sure what's really
happening, the wave peaks match  almost perfectly. After that, there's
one more failsafe: the low-frequency  alarm pulse directed at listening
posts in the Immunity. The, ah, intended       purpose of the detector
package.
     "These pulses are logged by neighboring units, and if a detector
has   already received a neighbor's pulse at the time its control loops
fall into   close phase, its sensors are placed into a sleep mode, and
the unit awaits a   coded confirmation signal from the Immunity. Once
this is received, the   control loops fall completely into phase, and
the inversion of the power  source occurs. This tampering is subtle and
clever and very clearly not   accidental.
     I really can't see how they accomplished this without my noticing,
but   be that as it may, I'm afraid the Temples' hysteria was well
founded: we've  been dropping live munitions into the heart of the
Mycosystem. If the proper  signals are sent, you'll end up with
hydrogen, iron, and enough waste heat       to sterilize the entire
Earth."
     Oh. Huh. So we were on an offensive mission after all? I should
have   felt stunned, I suppose. Betrayed, misused, whatever. But I
guess I'd known   all along that there was something schidlich going
on, what with all the   spies and sabotage and ambushes and such, so in
truth I felt almost no   surprise at all. In a way, it made perfect
sense, being exactly the sort of  plan men like Vaclav Lottick would
cook up: hit the Mycosystem hard, weaken  it, then move a strong
Immune system in over the rubble and attempt to  establish permanent
beachheads. Yeah.
     It was also exactly the sort of plan that would set off waves of
panic  in the general public if they heard about it. As Wallich had
said, no matter   how bad the status quo, people tended to take a dim
view of its violent   upset.
     And why not? We'd seen firsthand what the Mycosystem could do when
  irritated, when alerted to the presence of a few foreign molecules.
Who knew  how it might react to the loss of whole planets? And then, of
course, there   was this business about those planets still possibly
being inhabited. That  might still be a trick, intended to throw us
off balance. If so, it had  worked beautifully. But then again, it might
be true, and in that case, Louis  Pasteur had been the instrument of
genocide, or at least the threat of  genocide. But with the public
alerted to the Gladholders' discovery, who       would dare set off
those bombs now?
     Maybe that's why the Mycosystem did it, I thought disjointedly.
     Hostages, human shields. Maybe it was just protecting itself. But
that  was absurd, of course. Doubly absurd, because even if the
Mycosystem had  been capable of formulating theories and then acting
on them with such a  deeply human insight, it still couldn't know
Pasteurs true mission, when we  had not known it ourselves.
     So that left only one question: had Darren Wallich been in on the
 secret?
     As if on cue, he appeared in the hatchway, his hair and uniform in
  disarray.
     "I heard," he said.
     I studied him, looked hard at the eyes behind his zee-spec lenses.
"Did   you know about this, sir?"
     "No," he said firmly. "I did not. I assume Lottick must have,
though.
     The fact that he didn't tell me..." He trailed away.
     I couldn't find any trace of guile there, couldn't pin any
particular  suspicion on him. He'd known Lottick well, worked closely
with him, but so  had a lot of people. It didn't have to mean anything.
I decided, for the       moment, to believe him.
     I did see a more personal shame in those eyes, though, a sharp
embarrassment at having been caught, hypocritically, with his pants
down. And Davenroy's.
     Yeah, really, like we weren't going to hear?
     "I don't care who you've been sleeping with," I told him
truthfully.
     Anything that increased the net comfort level of the universe was
no  worry of mine. I wished them both well. But I could see his
mortification,  his voiceless insistence that he didn't know how it had
happened, that it  surely wouldn't happen again.
     And then his tickle capacitor must have lurched into high gear,
because   in spite of everything, he laughed. "Ha ha! Ha ha!" It was
sort of ugly to  watch, undignified, ill befitting a ship's captain,
and I would have told       'him so if the alarm buzzers hadn't come
alive to shatter the peace for  good.
     Receiver alarm. We'd been pinged. Before we'd even taken our
seats, our  "battle stations," as Wallich called them with full irony,
the trajectory  analysis program had refined its estimates, and when
the second ping came it       refined them still further, and then
another buzzer sounded.
     Proximity alarm.
     Hindsight filter: when something is coming straight at you, even
when   you have a clear view of it, you'll generally have a tough time
judging   range and velocity without an active ping. Particularly when
you're not sure   about the size of the object, as we surely were not.
As it turned out, based  on something called "radar cross-sections,"
we'd made an implicit assumption  that the enemy ships were about the
size of Louis Pasteur, where in fact  they were a good deal smaller.
Too, in our observations they'd always  accelerated at under 0.1
     gee, without ever informing us they were capable of more than
twice   that. We didn't know all this right away--what we knew was that
the threat   window's "time-to-contact" chronometer had jumped from
four hours to two with   the first ping, and then to 1:08 with the
second.
     There was a collective drawing of breath.
     The threat window came alive with gas plumes; the enemy ships and
their   swarm of attendant remotes were firing their engines, and
firing them   hard.
     "Well, here we go," Wallich said, the tremor in his voice
betraying not   fear but humor, a manic giggle he couldn't quite
suppress. "Rapisardi, get   ready with that final payload tube. We're
going to have to roll out the   welcome mat in about fifteen minutes."
     Third ping. Time-to-contact: 0:57. But the radar probe was already
  blooming, its signature smearing as it shot out tendrils of hungry
mycostructure.
     Shot them out fast. Technogenic life, I knew, existed in a realm
two or   three or even four orders of magnitude faster than its organic
predecessors,  and down here at the very lower reaches of the
Mycosystem it seemed one more   order had been gained. Sunlight:
bright, swollen, hot with proton radiation.
     Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, yeah, and the bloom
that  exploded out of that little probe must have been very close to
death indeed.
     The tendrils snaking out of it had grown dozens of kilometers in
only a   few seconds, grown them mainly downward in the direction of
the sun so that   they looked like fingers reaching out for Louis
Pasteur, looked like they   might actually make it across that gulf...
     But then tenth of the 	the 		of 	the 			probe 	a 	way 		across,
			ran  	out 					mass, bloom's expansion halting as suddenly as it had
begun,  leaving behind a structure larger and more intricate than a
trans-meg, damn  near as large as the flower end of a Veller body. I
wondered at the   chemistry involved, wondered that atoms and molecules
could be made to  rearrange themselves so quickly and so completely.
     I'd done an experiment as a child, once, peeling an orange in a
remote   corner of the house, well away from Momma. Her nose was well
tuned to the   smell of oranges, and if you peeled one she'd come over
and demand a third of  it as "fruit tax." This time, determined to hide
it from her and so,   sneakily, to escape taxation, I was surprised
instead to hear her call out,   "Somebody's eating oranges!" Right
away, with no delay at all. Those atoms  and molecules of orange had
diffused through the air, somehow finding their  way around corners,
down hallways and staircases and straight into Momma's  nose in a mere
fraction of a second. So who knew, really, how fast these  things could
go?
     "Ships are releasing some sort of spray in our direction," Lehne
cautioned.
     "Complementin?"
     "Unknown. Microscopic particles in water solution, definitely.
     Haptens. Probably it's complementin." "Time to contact?" "Uh,
twenty       minutes."
     "Okay," Wallich said, still suppressing that laugh, "Davenroy,
please   engage the engines. Rapisardi, vent reserve tank two, stat."
     Now there was a tactic you had to love: taking a third of our
precious   water supply and dumping it overboard into space. I opened
an exterior window   as the engines groaned themselves awake, and then
the dump valve was open   and the water was tumbling out behind us, big
globs breaking up into   droplets, failing away slowly, some of them
blasting into high-velocity mist  as they contacted the engine exhaust.
The dump went on for thirty seconds,  and by the end of it the space
behind us was sizzling both in visual and on  the threat board, little
abortive blooms seizing up the hydrogen and oxygen  and then halting
when they found no other building blocks, no precious  carbon or
nitrogen or sulfur, no metals except dissolved impurities in the
water itself.
     The idea, I guess, was to give the complementin something to hit,
 something to slow it down or deflect it so less could get through to
strike  us.
     Seemed fairly half-baked to me, but I supposed it was better than
nothing, and that, my friend, was the entire measure of our battle
plan.
     Somewhere around that point, the threat board went nuts. Another
bloom   back among the enemy ships, a big one this time. Not a drone,
not a probe,   but one of the actual ships was converting--its
t-balance somehow,  alarmingly, failing to protect it. And then in a
flash I knew why, knew what  was happening: the ships were accelerating
into their own complementin   spray, getting more of the stuff on
themselves than they were ever likely to   get on us.
     The realization shocked me to my core: they weren't just angry,
weren't   just willing to sacrifice, they were desperate to keep us
away from that   heat barrier. There must have been dozens of safer,
saner options available   to them, but this was the one they'd chosen,
the one they'd determined was   most likely to stop us here and now.
Talk about half-baked tactics! What   could drive them to such an
extreme? I mean, they were fanatics, yes,   obviously, but even
fanatics would normally try to maximize their advantage,  to minimize
their loss.
     What was it they thought they were protecting? Their homes and
families? The people on Earth and Venus? The Mycosystem itself?
     Baucum had admired the Mycosystem, I knew. Not loved it, maybe,
but   respected its power and intricacy, its longevity in the face of
mathematical  improbability. Very nearly divine, she'd said, almost
her dying words.
     Because the system never reached a halt state?
     Because unlike cellular automaton models, it steered clear of
extinction  and crystallization and simple repetition, stayed locked in
a state of   eternal chaotic growth? Mulch System could only do that if
you  intervened manually.
     Even random-number fuzz was not sufficient to keep it alive;
somehow,   it needed the intervention of a conscious hand.
     Cold tendrils lapped up and down my spine. Did the Mycosys-tem
need a  guiding hand as well? Did it have a guiding hand? Jesus, the
computing  ability of a cubic millimeter of bloom exceeded the combined
might of all  the calculating machines human beings had ever built. And
in the Gladholds   there were already computers smarter than mice,
computers capable of  conceptualizing their own existence, of writing
stories about  themselves.
     My god.
     "Davenroy," Wallich said, "wait five seconds and then cut the
engines.
     Strasheim, watch your goddamn board. If you let that system crash
again   I'll nail your head to the wall."
     "You want to beat on him, be quick about it," Lehne countered,
eyeing   the chronometer, "or lose your chance for good."
     Reluctantly; I drew my attention to the allocation system for a
few   precious seconds. It was a mess. Everyone was quietly panicking,
doing  exactly what I'd told them not to, so in disgust I wiped the job
stack clean  and set everything on a first-come-first-serve basis.
Frightfully  inefficient, yes, but also very unlikely to fail or crash.
     "Davenroy," Wallich said, "switch the engines to oxygen production
and   go to attitude program E-1. Paint the sky with it, stat."
     Here was another freaky idea: normally the engines laddered their
 uranium fuel down to iron and hydrogen, and then cascaded the hydrogen
back  up to iron again, releasing the theoretical maximum energy from
every   single atom.
     But if you were willing to eat the energy loss, you could tune
the  thing to produce any element you wanted.
     Atomic oxygen, for example, which could react with complementin
molecules, damaging or neutralizing them. Which could even oxidize
unsuspecting mycora, gifting them with an atom or two of building
material  but wreaking structural harm far out of proportion with that
slim benefit.
     The engine spat out "ionized" nuclei, I'd been told, nuclei almost
completely  devoid of electrons, which made them very reactive indeed,
possibly reactive   enough even to blast damaging microflaws into a
t-balance hull. As weapons go   this was better, at least, than water.
But it wasted fuel, another vital and  irreplaceable resource. We were
throwing our own lifeblood in the enemy's       face, hoping somehow to
buy enough time to reach the heat barrier   without...
     Damn it, there were too many distractions here. I tried to
reconstruct   my fragile chain of thought: math and the philosophy of
fear. Was the   Mycosystem somehow responsible for its own maintenance?
Did it possess that  inward-looking eye, that self-knowledge that
permitted it to guide its own  destiny? I shook my head; the question
was probably unanswerable, certainly  irrelevant at the moment. Of key
importance was that the Temples of  Transcendent Evolution must believe
it was true. And they must have   believed, somehow, that we still
represented a terrible threat, to the   Mycosys-tem, to the flow and
balance of life--all life?--in the solar  system.
     "Hey," I asked of no one in particular, "what would happen if you
 triggered a ladderdown reaction in the sun?"
     "Ladderdown?" Davenroy's voice answered. "Nothing, why?" "Cut the
 chatter," Wallich advised. "What about cascade fusion?" I pressed.
     "Well, that would liberate a store of fusion energy all at once,
and   leave a cool lump of iron where there used to be hot hydrogen and
helium. How   big a reaction are we talking about, dear?"
     "Like from one of our detector packages."
     Everyone stopped for a moment. That thought had registered. "What
are   you getting at, Strasheim?" Davenroy asked. "How big would the
explosion be?"
     "The inverted field," Rapisardi said, "forms an infinitesimally
thin   sphere just over three hundred meters in diameter. That might
cut through as   many as ten-to-the-thirtieth atoms."
     "Less than that in the photosphere, I would think," Davenroy told
him.
     "Still, you'd release the energy of thousands---possibly
millions--of   solar flares."
     "Doing what to the Mycosystem?" I asked. No one had an answer for
me.
     Scharfblick, the awakening, the moment when it all becomes
obvious. I   had the answer: it would murder the Mycosystem. Not
destroy every single   mycorum, certainly; it seemed to me that even if
the sun exploded there'd  still be shelter available behind the
planets, or in the outer system,  or wherever.
     Some spores would survive, fall back in, start blooming. But the
continuity would have been interrupted, the hideous clockwork precision
 kicked all to pieces. The guiding hand burned away, leaving only
mindless  matter behind, the festering corpse of the Temples' pet
demigod. Maybe  another mind would arise from the wreckage, or maybe
not, but either way the       original mycodeity would be lost.
     Deicide. God-murder.
     Was it true? Could it really happen that way? I didn't know and
didn't   care; in a them-or-us situation, I was certainly going to pick
"us." Given a   choice between the death of the Mycosystem and the
death of the Immunity,   there was no choice. The point was that the
Temples must also know this, must   also see this as obvious, even if
they didn't agree with it. The   self-sacrificing martyrs in those
enemy ships believed it, believed that we  Pasteurites had both the
power and the motive to strike. Here was a threat  worth countering, a
cause--in their minds--worth dying for. Here was a more  or less
logical explanation for all that had happened to us. I'd heard  no
others.
     And maybe--the thought chilled me right through--we could actually
  follow through on the threat. Lottick would probably demand this of
us, if  the questions were posed. A chance to end it all, a chance to
drive the   system toward a halt state we could deal with. No more
refugee existence, no   more bowing down before the might of our enemy,
waiting grimly for the tide   to turn against us again.
     "Strasheim, what's going on with my system requests? Watch your
damn   board, man!"
     "No time," I said, and dove straight into Mulch System. The
automaton   rules needed only a little tweaking, here and here and
here. Testing: no.
     Testing again: no. This wasn't working the way I'd hoped it would.

     But still, the effect I wanted was so simple...
     "Strasheim!"
     Tweak and tweak and then test again. And again. Oh, I thought,
this   rule's interfering with the expansion. Do I need it? No? I tried
another,   slightly different rule-set. Yeah, well, close enough.
Simple enough. Looks  like a flare to me, baby.
     "Strasheim, what the hell is wrong with you? What are you
hammering the       computer with?"
     "Captain," I said without exiting Mulch System, "slave your
zee-spec to  mine.
     Scratch that; everyone slave your zee-specs to mine. I have
something very important to show you."
     "Have you lost your mind, Strasheim?"
     "Nope. I may have finally found it. Let me know when you're in."
     "Christ. Okay, I'm in."
     "In."
     "Me too. What's this about?"
     "Okay," I said, "welcome to Mulch System. The big yellow thing is
the   sun, the little green speck is us, and the little red-brown balls
are   all planets.
     This one--" I flicked on a pointing arrow "--similar to Mercury,
is   Mulchury, behind which our simulated Louis Pasteur is hiding. Note
all the  red stuff swirling around--that's TGL. Lots of it. Now, when
we trigger a       million-strength solar flare..."
     I activated the new rules, watched gravity switch off in one
corner of   the sun. A huge blob of yellow material, not true star
stuffbut the same   generic "hot" that filled the cores of planets,
splurted out into the system,   tearing out mycostructure, liquefying
planetary surfaces. It didn't take any  hard-core mathematical analysis
to see things dying out--it was evident  everywhere, even in the places
the ersatz flare hadn't touched. The   data-rich waves that should be
sweeping the system end to end, reflecting and  refracting and
endlessly mutating, driving new spurts of growth and decline  and
growth again, fell apart into paroxysms. Stains of red gave way swiftly
      to brown and green, mulch and bare rock taking over.
     The system flickered, gasped, collapsed into localized patterns of
  simple oscillation. It would have died out anyway, sooner or later,
but   Wallich and the others didn't know that, and anyway in this case
the death  was very clearly precipitated by the flare. Again, it didn't
take a genius to   see that. But there were four of them here.
     I zoomed in on Louis Pasteur, ran the sequence again at much
higher  magnification. Mulchury the size of a house, brown and smooth,
untouched by  technogenic contagion. The viewer's eye looking along the
equator, past the       tiny green spaceship-dot to the blank wall far
beyond, light-years   beyond.
     All at peace, and then storms of yellow suddenly sweeping the
planet, a   wall of yellow astronomically huge, breaking apart into
threads and whorls  and roaring by, leaving the dayside a melted ruin,
the nightside scathed  only here and there by lashes of solar fire.
Pasteur herself escaping  untouched behind the planet.
     I ran it again, this time focusing on the giant planet Johnpiter,
 which, along with its moons, weathered the upper reaches of the storm
without  serious harm. Surface habitats were probably in trouble, but
there would be       time to Evacuate those. Down below the ice, all
would be safe and   secure.
     I had grave doubts about the scientific veracity of the sim; the
underlying physics bore little resemblance to those of the real
universe.
     Probably the details were utterly wrong. Maybe Pasteur wouldn't
survive,  maybe Jupiter and the Gladholds wouldn't. Maybe the whole
Mycosystem  wouldn't die out like this. Probably not, I guessed. But
the sim was just a  visual aid, just a rapid, visceral demonstration of
what almost certainly  was true: that we had, within our grasp, the
power not only to tear the  heart out of the Mycosystem, but to blast
away the bulk of its body as well.
     Lottick's plan was a feeble joke by comparison, spitballs against
a  raging elephant.
     "This," I said, not giving anyone a chance to speak, "is almost
certainly what the Temples are afraid of. This is what they're trying
to  prevent.
     There are solid reasons to believe that the Mycosystem is
intelligent,  is self-aware. Renata Baucum believed it, enough to give
up her life, and  whether or not we believe it, or even care, the
Temples seem inclined to act  on this theory as if it were God's own
truth. And on ourselves as if we were       the servants of absolute
evil."
     Set at maximum speed, the sim ran quickly. We'd all been in here
twenty   or thirty seconds, no more, and rather than invite scrutiny,
invite   questions whose answers I didn't know or didn't like, I
released everyone's  zee-specs and closed up Mulch System. It had
served its purpose.
     Exiting back into reality, I became aware of a lump under my leg,
 something caught between my seat and myself. I fished it out: the
Gladholder fear doll.
     Slick and squidgy in my hand, its blank face a leather parody of
terror.
     "I'm afraid," it insisted quietly. But that was a lie, a
recording; if   there were machines that could feel, this was surely
not one of them, and its  mimicry served only to cheapen the genuine
product. Fear? What the hell did  it know? Outrage seized me for a
moment, and with an angry flick I sent  the thing spinning away.
     Darren Wallich began to laugh.
     "Cut it out!" I shouted, turning to him, glaring him down. "Turn
that   damn thing off! It's time for a command decision. Humorless, no
tickling. I   mean it."
     I had no right to speak to him that way. I didn't try to excuse
it, and   still don't. But for some reason he listened, and complied.
The change in his   face was marked and immediate, muscles loosening
here, tightening  there, worry lines furrowing his brow.
     "Speak," he said coldly.
     "Another ship has bloomed," Lehne said. "And the complementin will
hit   us in eight minutes."
     "Shut up. Strasheim, what's on your mind?"
     I gulped. Time to take the final plunge. "Sir, there's no telling
what  lengths the Temples will go to to protect the Mycosystem. They
worship it,  yes, they believe it to be some sort of hyperintelligence,
maybe a direct  link to God himself. It doesn't matter whether that's
true; what matters is  that the Immunity really may have the power they
attribute to it. Not just  to hang on indefinitely at Jupiter, or climb
aboard a starship and fly away,  but to take back the inner system
itself. To murder their god. This places  the Immunity in very grave
danger even if that power does not exist, or  is never exercised."
     "Yes?" Wallich said, still not getting my drift.
     I paused, collecting my thoughts. Self-sacrifice seemed to be
quite the   rage these days, and really, what chance did we have of
surviving all the   way to the heat barrier? The Temples' ships were
falling all over themselves   to die, to take us out with them. And if
you can't beat them..."Sir, whether  or not the Mycosystem has a right
to exist, whether or not it has the right  to destroy us or we have the
right to destroy it, we're in possession of  critical information which
the Temples are going to act on whether or not  the Immunity is
informed. We can do this thing, right now, but there's no   telling
what the consequences might be. That sim of mine doesn't have the
fidelity to help us know this, meaning we'd be gambling with the lives
of  every living thing in the solar system."
     Wallich nodded. "Agreed. I'd never authorize it."
     "We could simulate the consequences precisely," Rapisardi
objected.
     "No," Wallich said tersely, with a dismissive wave of the hand
which       Rapisardi of course couldn't see. "It would take hours,
days, maybe longer.
     We've got minutes before these people kill us. Think of something
 else."
     I cleared my throat. "Captain, I recommend... Jesus. I recommend
that   we compose a detailed message, including images, science
readings,   speculations, and my own Mulch World sim, and we transmit
it back to the  Immunity.
     Whatever they decide to do, it's.., our duty not to take this
information to our graves."
     He eyed me humorlessly, visibly weighing my words. "You propose
suicide?"
     Suicide, yeah, that was what it came down to. One more group of
fanatics, willing to sacrifice ourselves for some vague perception of
the  greater good. And yet, there were things worth dying for. The
philosophy  that counted human life as infinitely precious had always
been, in my   opinion, an erroneous one. Human life was finite in
scope, finite in  duration; we all had to die sometime. In fact, our
lives might be so  precious to us precisely because they were finite,
and could in fact be  traded, sure as a gram of uranium, for the things
we valued even more.
     Things like hope.
     And it wasn't like we had a real long time left to live, anyway.
"Yes,   sir, I do."
     Wallich didn't laugh, didn't smile, didn't react at all.
     "I've seen a lot of shit down here I didn't expect to see," he
muttered.
     "Lately I've been feeling a lot of doubt, about things I used to
know   for sure. These issues need to be thought through, calmly, by
wiser heads.
     By all the heads. Yes, do it, send the message. Stat. Ladies and
gentlemen, I'd like to tank.., like... I'd like to take this
opportunity to  thank you all for excellent service."
     Yeah, you're welcome. I had most of the stuff for the message
lying   around already, in buffers waiting to be archived and collage&
The  speculation part I just sort of blurted out in a voice recording:
"Citizens  of the Immunity, the Mycosystem may in fact be conscious.
     Humans on Venus, AIs in the Gladholds, fantastically huge
computing  power...
     Whatever, I don't really have time to explain. The Temples regard
it as  a conscious being, an intelligent one, and at this point I'm
willing to  grant them the benefit of the doubt. They believe we intend
to destroy it,  destroy the Mycosystem, with a solar cascade reaction.
We may in fact be  capable of this, but we do not intend to attempt it,
and are sending this  message, at the cost of our lives, as proof of
our sincerity. Please  use this information wisely.
     This is John
     Strasheim, Mycosystem Mission One correspondent aboard the Immune
ship   Louis Pasteur... signing off."
     After that, I gathered up the other message elements and wrapped
them   in a transmission packet, and then, trying not to think too much
about what   I was doing, I fired up the transmitter, set the frequency
back to   high-microwave, and set the data rate at maximum.
     "On your command, sir," I said.
     Beside and above me, Tosca Lehne looked shattered. Never to see
his   little boy again, never to see anything; all chances zeroed, all
patterns  terminated. He opened his mouth for a moment, but didn't,
finally,  object. What could he say?
     "Go," Wallich ordered.
     I pressed the button, and of course nothing visible happened right
  away. You can't see or feel a microwave transmission. But then the
replication alarms went crazy, and then I guess the complementin hit us
a  few seconds later, or else the microwaves overcame any protection
the  t-balance hull might otherwise have provided, because not only did
the hull  start blooming on the outside, but some determined mycorum
tunneled its way  straight through the wall of the bridge, blossoming
in a little rainbow  flower beside my head.
     I paused for a moment, frozen in place, and then let out a scream
like   I never expect to again. Fumbling with my harness, I managed to
release it.
     The engines had stopped firing at some point, though, and in null
gravity   there was nothing to pull me away from the bloom. I pushed
against my chair,   very nearly sending myself into the pulsing
technogenic mass, but checked   the momentum in time and sailed off in
the other direction, down past   Wallich's legs.
     Lehne was scrambling, too, cranking up the hull temperature and
then  hurling himself at the emergency locker. He came away with a
welding       torch, fumbled to light it, fumbled again.
     I hadn't stopped screaming yet. There was a part of me that wished
I   would, a part that was embarrassed at making such a fuss when this
had, after   all, been my idea. But there was another part of me that
remembered the   examples of Tug Jinacio, of Renata Bau-cum, of the
planet Earth itself, and   wanted no part of that death. Pressing a
button was easy; holding calm and  still while the consequences
unfolded was, well, not.
     But the mycora weren't eating me, not yet. I looked up at the
bloom and   just sort of scratched my head. Earlier the mycoric
tendrils had shot across   space like cannon fire, covering kilometers
in moments. This one, though,   seemed hard-pressed to cross a space of
centimeters. The flower had grown   slightly, rearranged itself into
more of a bumpy pillow shape, and the  bulkhead behind it was
definitely eroding away, pitting and shrinking  back like beer foam.
     But mostly, the bloom was filling in, turning solid, looking
profoundly       unlike any other bloom I'd seen or heard of.
     Lehne finally got his torch lit.
     "Stay away from it," Wallich commanded. "Burn it if it starts to
grow   again, but otherwise stay back."
     The look on his face was odd, grim and yet thoughtful. He was, I
realized, conducting an experiment. With our lives. Well, actually our
lives  were forfeit anyway.
     "What are you doing?" I asked him. Apparently I'd stopped
screaming.
     "It looks like a face," he said. And he didn't laugh, and he
wasn't   joking. I looked, and yeah, it did look a lot like a face.
     "You see shapes sometimes," I said, quoting his own words back at
him.
     "Pincushions and bunny rabbits. Like looking at clouds, you know?"
     Aft somewhere, I heard Rapisardi and Davenroy shrieking. "It
really   does look like a face," Wallich insisted.
     I looked again, and this time I couldn't deny it: the structure
had a  forehead, a nose, depressions where the eyes and mouth should be
... As I  watched, it grew lips and eyelids, and its color faded from
rainbow  transparency to something pale and opaque, like cream. A
somewhat  normal-looking bloom still surrounded it, a shuddering
rainbow cloud pulling  material atom by atom from the surrounding
bulkhead, but the thing in the       center was undeniably a human
face. Female, in fact, and rather pretty.
     I started screaming again when it opened its eyes.

     TWENTY FOUR
     CONNECTION

     The face seemed ready to scream right back at me, its mouth
opening,   pale tongue wriggling inside. But instead it croaked, closed
its mouth,   opened it again, and spoke: "Understand? Understand?" it
said, the voice  gravelly and hoarse but clearly recognizable.
"Language, speech. I am  speaking with you."
     "What the bloody hell is going on here?" Wallich demanded,
drifting up  to confront the thing, well, face to face. "Understand?"
It coughed  again.
     "Yes, I understand you. What... What the hell are you?"
     "Unpacked," the face said, seeming to gasp the word.
"Intelligence,   human, Earth. Difficulty now, this is not working as
intended. Limited state,       confusing."
     Wallich seemed less at a loss than Lehne or myself, but that's not
  saying much. All he had to say was, "What?"
     "Earth. Understood? Earth? I am from. Human."
     "You're a human from Earth?"
     "Yes!" A smile, beaming out from that cream-white face. The lips,
I   noted, had begun to redden, the eyes to fill in with ghostly
colored  pupils. Brown. "A human from Earth, now Unpacked." "Unpacked?"
     "Change of form, yes. Rearrangement, recomposition, considerable
expansion."
     "Are you the Mycosystem?" Wallich tried. He looked just about
ready to       explode from shock.
     "Understanding, not," the face said. Its voice had gone smoother,
and   its tone now was distinctly female, distinctly reassuring.
"Please try that       again."
     "Are you, um, alone?"
     Again, the smile. "Not alone, of course not. Billions. All the
Unpacked       people."
     "Billions?" Wallich shook his head, uncomprehending. "Where do you
  live? We haven't seen you."
     "That is very unlikely," the face said, sounding a bit surprised
itself. "We are large!"
     "Urn, how large?"
     "Very! Solar system! We overlap, occupy contiguous space. Not the
same   as before, because we are Unpacked. This limited form, this
solid flesh,  confines. Very few choose to return to this form, this
solid flesh, because       it con. fines. We choose to remain
Unpacked."
     Wallich cleared his throat, made an attempt to compose himself,
which,   given the circumstances, worked out fairly well. "Are you
trying to tell  me... that the Mycosystem consists of... what, Unpacked
human bodies?
     Enormous bodies?"
     "Mycosystem? There is a system, yes. Not just bodies, no, of
course   not. We do not have 'bodies' in the sense you probably mean,
but there are  the complexes which constitute us, and the complexes
which support us."
     Wallich absorbed that, became calmer still. Amazingly calm. Was
this   the persona he'd tried to cover up? This unflappable inner
peace? I couldn't  see what was so bad about it--dour, yes, but
pragmatic. Perfect in a   crisis.
     "Why have you attacked our cities," he said, "killed our people?
This   is not acceptable."
     "Killed?" asked the face with cheerful, exuberant innocence.
     "Attacked?
     Please understand, there are limitations. Speed of wave
propagation,   strength of materials. The Unpacked mind is great and
slow and deliberate at  the highest levels, the conscious levels. Your
existence is only recently   known to us. The complexes which support
are not constrained by your   existence. You must constrain them. This
is not difficult. The  information will be provided.
     "Let me restart. Hello! It pleases the Unpacked to communicate
with   you! We have been unable to communicate because of the
destruction of support  complexes, about which you are very insistent
and skilled. The complex you  see, this structure of solid flesh, was
designed for rapid deployment and  maximum recognition. Possible here,
close to the sun, because of  warmth--excess energy is easy to obtain.
Thank you for coming!
     Communication with remote sites requires infrastructure, which
does not  exist, which is difficult to create and control. Here, things
are faster.
     Here, I may exist in this form. Therefore, we communicate.
Welcome!
     Apologies for your condition!"
     "Apologies?" I said, suddenly finding my voice. "Apologize to the
  dead."
     "Many of your 'dead' have been Unpacked. It is unlikely they would
  choose to return to a solid form. Very few of us choose this. Others
of your  dead we could not prevent. You would not let us. You damaged
support   complexes."
     "Well, pardon the intrusion!" I said, fighting off a sudden giddy
 anger.
     "What is it you want? To 'Unpack' us?"
     "The support complexes will be constrained," she assured me. "This
 information will be provided. Understand, all that you are is
encapsulated  also within us. It is no patronization to say, we have
concerns you will not  comprehend. But your incomprehension and your
reluctance are encapsulated  and understood. Want? We do not want.
     "All harm has been unintended, and will be prevented with your
cooperation, but intentional interference will bring intentional harm.
This   device--" the face glanced around at the ship surrounding it
"--is clever.
     Our systems had great difficulty in isolating it. But the support
complexes  will be modified to recognize its substance in the future.
This is not a  threat; barring damage to constituent and support
complexes, you are utterly  free. Free to conduct your lives in the
classical manner, to escape this  solar system, to populate the stars.
Free to Unpack, if you choose."
     I shuddered, my skin prickling. "Is that ... is that what you
want?"
     The face looked at me consolingly. "We do not want, little one. We
have   grown beyond it."
     Oh, yeah, that sounded real appealing.

     TwENTY FIVE
     IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM . . .

     It's funny how the pivotal moments of your life slide by just as
readily as the trivial ones. The Face conferred on us the sage
knowledge of   marking regions of space off-limits to "support
complexes," and then, with   little fanfare, withdrew, patching the
hole it had come through, scattering   behind us in a cloud of tiny
solar sails before we crossed the dreaded   heat barrier.
     And that was it: the moment of connection had come and gone,
leaving us   with little more than another message to beam up to the
Immunity. A shorter   one, too.
     The sheer banality of it astonished me. Our whole way of life had
just  been shattered, recast, deeply altered in ways we could probably
only begin  to comprehend, and yet there we were, still stuck on this
little ship  for the foreseeable future and beyond.
     The less said about those long months the better, I think, because
if   the sunward journey had brought out the best in us, our courage
and   conviction and our sense of discovery, rest assured that the slow
climb back  up had brought out the worst.
     The gist of the Mycosystem's message? "Hi, you're small and
annoying.''   Ah, but we're fast.
     I'll share one last technical term with you: "moonwalker's
syndrome.''   An affliction of early astronauts, and recent ones; once
you've been a part  of something larger than yourself, larger than you
know you'll ever see   again, the future ahead gets sort of washed out
in the glare. Looking forward       becomes difficult--there is no more
moon to walk on, no more history to  make.
     The company of those afflicted, sad to say, is often less than
charming.
     What became of the last enemy ships, I really don't know. Nobody
was  watching, no instruments recording, when they vanished, taking
their swarm  of remote devices with them. We did manage to pull
ourselves together,   though, in time to perform the plane change
maneuver at perihelion an hour  and a half later. The sun, to my
surprise, never grew much larger than a  peach, about a third as large
as Jupiter would appear from the surface of  Ganymede.
     But considerably warmer and brighter.
     We did indeed pop out of the ecliptic plane, to safer vantages
from   which we could resume unfettered radio contact with home, but it
was four  long months later that we reentered the ecliptic,
circularized, and limped  with the last of our fuel to one of the lower
Gladholds. Not Saint Helier  this time, but a much smaller rock called
Saint Gervase, whose language gave  fits to Chris Dibrin's translation
software, and whose Temples-friendly  government regarded us with, at
best, grave suspicion.
     From there, it was half a year to Ganymede, and then another half
a   year in quarantine (no, they didn't let me keep the fruits and
spices), and  by the time it was over the five of us could barely stand
to look at each   other. You don't spend two years in a bathroom
together and remain friends,  it simply doesn't work like that, so once
released from confinement we went  our separate ways with barely a
good-bye nod.
     I kept track, though, if for no other reason than a berichter's
sense   of duty. The Temples of Transcendent Evolution never admitted
to a formal  relationship with our attackers, or with the dozens of
bottle-men and -women  who'd started the fatal blooms that sent us on
our way. They've proven as  flexible and nebulous a foe as the
Mycosystem itself; the legal actions  against them may well stretch on
for centuries. Who knows: maybe they are       innocent.
     Vaclav Lottick, for his part, denied all allegations, denied any
conspiracy to deploy weapons without the knowledge of the Immunity's
populace, denied lying to the crew of Louis Pasteur or to anyone else.
     Nonetheless, and considerably to his credit, he resigned his
position as  head of research.
     Immune science being a field in sharp decline, one might say he
had   little to lose anyway, but the fact is, he was neither elected
nor appointed  to his job, but rather had seen the whole vast structure
accrete around him   like so much coral. And yes, he was a pillar of
our society throughout the   bloom years, a remote figure but also a
bold and brilliant and diligent one   whose example, in retrospect,
really did inspire us all. His departure was a  deeply symbolic act,
marking the definitive end to the era he himself had  helped to define,
and those who claim otherwise are, quite simply, full of       it.
Of Pasteurs crew, only Davenroy found a secure job still waiting
for   her: ladderdown research, as before. The others accepted
figurehead   positions for a while before moving on to other
pursuits--Lehne in  agricultural genetics, Rapisardi as a major player
on the starship project,  which had already begun to reap the benefits
of our shifting economy.
     Wallich flew, I think, two more minor space missions before
settling down to  a teaching position at the new university in
Ansharton. Tug Jinacio remained  dead, and if Renata Baucum had
survived her conversion in some vastly  altered form, she'd declined to
make it evident. The ship, battered,  obsolescent, and reeking of
backroom politics, was parked in a holding orbit  above the moon
Europa, where it remains to this day.
     The changes. How to discuss them? Ours was the most detailed
exchange   of information the Unpacked have ever undertaken, and
probably this is just  as well; those three minutes of conversation
rocked Immune society to its   core, a salvation from which we may, in
some sense, never truly recover. And   now we get a word here and
there, an enigmatic phrase lifting starward on the   solar wind every
now and again... Is this all the Mycosystem has to offer?
     Not even the Temples' short-lived probes have managed to return
much  useful information. Just how slow are those Unpacked minds? Slow
enough, one   hopes, that this apathetia will continue indefinitely,
that the next   revelation will wait until some of us, at least, have
slipped away into the  great galactic night.
     I, as you're probably aware, never did go back to the shoe
factory, but  rolled my sleeves up, pulled together some financing, and
created the  Subscription News Network, which, despite its name, is
supported mainly by  voluntary donations. Have you sent yours in?
Directorship, which turned out  to be quite a different thing from the
actual reporting to which I'd hoped  to dedicate myself, keeps me
plenty busy, and this may be why it's taken me  so much time to
   deliver this account, this history for which I'd been contracted on
that       fateful Ansharton morning so many years ago. But maybe it's
more than  that.
     Maybe I knew, maybe I sensed, that the closing chapter simply
hadn't   come yet, that our story was not complete. Not until Wallich
fell ill. A       neurodegenerative disorder, pathogen unidentified.
Prognosis: terminal.
     "I want you to attend the ceremony," he called me up abruptly and
said.
     They were his first words to me in almost thirteen years,
delivered in  gruff barks and rumbles. In a way, it was touching he'd
turned his sense of  humor off just for me, sharing his true face as
he'd done so many times on  the long journey home. Remember me? he
seemed to be saying.
     By tradition, though, you only get one witness at the ceremony,
and his       choice of me was significant, a final mark of approval
and trust.
     "My tale is told," he'd said to me, dry-eyed and somber. "All
that's   left is the writing it down. You still know how to do that,
right?"
     I'd sworn off journeying for life, but here was one I couldn't
bring   myself to refuse. The sway of captains is little affected by
time and space,   and so it was me in the witness seat that day,
watching the screens, watching   fifty different views of the inside
and outside of Wallich's transition pod   fifty thousand kilometers
below, down on the fringes of Unpacked space.
     He conducted himself with admirable composure, tickle capacitor
off, as   he disengaged the failsafes one by one and submitted to the
confirmation       sequence.
     "Are you here of your own free will?" the pod asked him.
     A clear voice: "Yes."
     "Do you have any doubts or questions about the procedure?" "No."
     "Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?"
     He smiled wanly, showing off a tremulous hand, the flesh of his
balding   head ticcing visibly. "Better than death, I think."
     "Please answer with an unambiguous yes or no. Are you absolutely
certain this is what you want?"
     "Acknowledged," the pod said. "Confirmation sequence complete.
Verbal       authorization is enabled."
     There is but one cure for moonwalker's syndrome: to grow beyond
it.
     Wallich drew breath a few times, not apparently dreading the
moment but  not working to hasten it, either. Finally, he turned to one
of the camera  dots, looked straight out at me and tipped a crisp
salute. Farewell, friend.
     Then he licked his lips, drawing the event out one moment longer
before  giving voice to his final word: "Bloom."